


nothing's gonna hurt you, baby

by powerandpathos



Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Chinatown, Gang Violence, M/M, New York, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-05-20 03:13:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 50,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14886551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: Guan Shan's father leaves his family for work in New York at the beginning of the First World War — and is never heard from again.In the autumn of 1928, thirteen years later, Guan Shan makes his own way to lower Manhattan's Little China to find him, with only the name of the man who signed his father's contract.When he finds himself falling into the world of America's Roaring Twenties and Tong Wars, and everyone he meets is not quite as they seem, finding his father turns out to be much more complicated than he’d thought.





	1. loyalty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [traceytries](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceytries/gifts).



> This fic was requested by Tracey! ([Tumblr](http://teanshan.tumblr.com) | [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceytries/pseuds/traceytries))  
>    
> [Find me on Tumblr.](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)  
>    
> The fic was named after [Cara Salimando's cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvunuNKNk7w) of 'Nothing's Gonna Hurt You, Baby' by Cigarettes After Sex. It just had such an interesting connotation when I listened to it (and I had no idea what to call this fic).

The hand laundry was nestled in the chaotic mess of it all, down a series of backways off Mott Street and crowded between hidden gambling houses, railroad flats, and brown-brick tenements where barely a sliver of light could break through.

Steam leaked out from the back rooms, the smell of salt and carbolic soap hitting Guan Shan, tar-like and cloying, and the roar of the place was like standing beneath a waterfall until his eardrums ached. In the front, laundry shelves kept to the walls, clean clothes packed and labelled ready for collection, an ironing board leant behind the counter, and an abacus and lock-counter perched on the glossed wood.

The laundry was identical to every other in lower Manhattan: living quarters behind a curtained doorway, the strings of dripping clothes from wall to wall like telecommunication wires, heat and steam seeping through the building, and then the machine in the back—steam boiler and sinks crowded in the sunless room.

Guan Shan felt dizzy and suffocating in the place, but he let the door close behind him, a doorbell peal ringing above him.

The man behind the counter looked up.

‘Well, you look ready to drop,’ Lau Guo Wei remarked, pausing his scribbling in a purchase ledger. The old man’s name was written in white paint on a banner over the store’s front door, and Guan Shan had almost fallen to his knees at the sight of it—at the sight of him, old and balding and frail, glasses falling off the tip of his nose with every bow of his head.

Guan Shan took a step forward. His shoe squelched on the wooden floorboards.

It had rained when Guan Shan was smuggled onto the fishing boat in Guangzhou, again when they berthed in the dark moors of Bangkok’s harbour, when he weaved his way through the docks and onto the coal train to Istanbul, Hagia Sophia a pillared monolith by the coast. It rained in Paris, Guan Shan’s first glimpse of the bright Tower blurred by storm clouds, and in Toronto the downpour felt like ice on his skin, warming and still wet as the steel train brought him south along the Land of Opportunity’s coastline. New York offered him nothing different.

New York, as he squeezed out from between wooden cargo boxes and steel girders, rained on him and its climbing buildings. It drenched its iron bridges and filled its rivers indiscriminately, muddied its streets and gutters and darkened the roads, swimming with creeping automobiles that Guan Shan could barely stop to stare at long enough—strange and hulking and growling.

His shirt was soaked against his skin, goosebumps on every part of his unexposed flesh. Tiredness wracked his bones; his muscles were wasting from the journey, cramped spaces and little food and an intense labour he was unused to. He needed to clean himself and dress in something untattered and unworn every day for a month, free of billowing train smoke. He needed to sleep until his knees no longer protested at every haggard step from the pier to Chinatown.

He needed a place to stay. A job. To find his father. To do good by his mother. To not bring shame to his family as his father had. To get revenge.

‘Great Uncle,’ Guan Shan said. ‘My name’s Mo Guan Shan. I wrote to you months ago—’

‘Nephew!’ Guo Wei crowed, hobbling out from behind the counter. He aided himself with a walking stick, hand shaking, back bent over from a youth in the gold mines, but his grip on Guan Shan’s shoulder was firm and almost bruising. An angry testament to some internal strength that New York hadn’t yet stripped away from him. ‘All the way from Canton. I wasn’t sure you’d make it.’

‘Yeah, I wasn’t either,’ Guan Shan admitted. ‘But I need to finish some business here.’

Guo Wei examined him. ‘Your mother and father?’ he asked, appropriately and timely.

Of course the questions were going to come. Of course context would be needed. Guo Wei could have made it worse, had he wanted to. He was a laundryman; he knew everyone’s business. Plucked their bloodied dollar bills and their dubious receipts from suit jackets. Sewed up ripped thigh-seams in evening gowns and starched out the lipstick stains from shirts. He knew everyone’s business, but not because he asked. Humans made the kind of mistakes that made them easy to read.

‘My mother’s at home,’ Guan Shan told him. ‘She’s staying with family in the country, away from the war. I haven’t seen my father in thirteen years. The letters stopped coming a few years ago.’

‘He came here,’ Guo Wei guessed, knowing.

Guan Shan nodded. ‘I’m going to find him.’

Guo Wei paused. ‘Your father was alone when he came? If it was New York he came to, then he never passed through my shop.’

‘He had a contract with someone here. There were others, but I don’t know who they were.’ Guan Shan swallowed hard. ‘Who they are.’

Guo Wei’s mouth had sloped downwards at the corners. ‘Guan Shan… Thirteen years… Have you considered—’

‘I know. I’ve known it for thirteen years.’

‘And you still came?’

‘I’m loyal to my family,’ Guan Shan told him forcefully. ‘I have to find out the truth. I have to know what happened.’ He thought about how they hadn’t mourned. How there’d been no funeral, no celebration of death. He thought about how, so openly, he was driven by this. He thought about how, so hidden, she must have been too. ‘I owe it to my mother.’

Guo Wei observed him. His eyes were rheumy, his veins purpling, hands blotched with sun spots and easy bruises as his body grew fragile. Guan Shan’s mother told him that his great uncle had been in America for almost forty years—through the gold rush, the migration east, the immigration acts placed on the country. He had weathered it, and knew what it was to be punished for putting food on his family’s table. He’d understand the storm building inside Guan Shan now, dark clouds for the inhale, pumice and petrichor on an exhale, thunder and lightning for words.

‘Look, I need a place to stay while I’m here,’ Guan Shan said, biting the corner of his cheek, looking elsewhere. He swallowed the welling pride that would put him on the street if he wasn’t careful, made himself stomach what it meant to ask for help—for a crutch. ‘Will you help me?’

Guo Wei sighed, rubbed his eyes, and Guan Shan felt his stomach drop. ‘You can’t stay here,’ Guo Wei told him.

‘Please, Guo Wei—’

Guo Wei raised his voice. ‘I have  _seven_ boys already in the back room without papers, Guan Shan. My wife refuses another. I might wash the governor’s suits, but I don’t want to spit in his eye, too.’

Guan Shan gritted his teeth. ‘But in your letter—’

‘I’m sorry, Mo Guan Shan.’ Guo Wei patted his arm. ‘I know someone who can help you, but that’s all the help I can give.’

_And are they gonna send me on again, too? Like every other contact I’ve had in this city?_

‘I don’t have money. I can’t pay—’

‘Of course you can’t,’ Guo Wei said, cutting him off again. ‘But he won’t need your money. Wait here. I’ll send for him.’

‘For who?’ Guan Shan asked, exhausted, but Guo Wei was already staggering away, walking stick clicking fast against the floorboards, loud over the sound of washing presses and chatter in the back rooms. He waved a hand behind him, and stuck his head out of the shop’s front door.

‘Hui Chen!’ the old man shouted. ‘Message!’

Guan Shan saw a small boy scuttle before Guo Wei, ruffled and blackened by coal smoke. He squinted up at Guo Wei, who wasn’t a tall man, but his bowed back made him tower naturally over anyone smaller.

Guan Shan couldn’t hear the rest of Guo Wei’s command; there was a ruckus in one of the back rooms. Someone was shouting at one of the washing boys, a pail of water kicked over, probably. Maybe a hanging wire snapped. Guan Shan didn’t try to listen.

Guo Wei returned a few moments later. He pointed a finger at Guan Shan.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and staggered back behind the counter to his ledger. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, picked up his pencil, and continued scribbling.

Guan Shan, now little more than a ghost to the man, waited.

There was no clock in the laundry room. The shadows couldn’t shift through the windows or Manhattan’s clouded sky. Guan Shan couldn’t guess how long he stood there, feet sharp-sore and aching, eyes threatening to close with every slow breath, until a blond head put its head around the doorway, caught sight of Guan Shan—red-haired, haggard, carrying anger in his marrow—and smiled.

‘This is Mo Guan Shan, Guo Wei?’ the man asked, too-pretty and barely twenty. His suit was immaculate, a flash of gold hanging from his waistcoat, a jade stickpin securing his tie, drawn-down umbrella propped in the hand laundry’s doorway. Guan Shan didn’t know how someone like him could survive in a place like this. Maybe that was exactly how: too-pretty, a quality that could thrive here and now.

Guo Wei nodded. ‘Jian Yi will help you, Guan Shan. Go with him.’

Guan Shan wanted to curl his lip at Jian Yi’s amiable hospitality—his bright eyes, luminous skin, his pretty smile that lingered somewhere between dangerous and idiotic, the clean elegance of his fingers as they shook hands, bowing slightly. It was almost an affront to everything Guan Shan had been through to get here—to everything he  _was._ To the dirt under his nails and the swimming turmoil hidden under his features.To Guo Wei and every other Chineseman that had wept and bled his way to stand on America’s fertile soil.

Guan Shan pressed his contempt far down. He could hear his mother’s voice so clearly, unmarred by distance or time.

 _Don’t be jealous of what others have, Guan Shan_ , she would tell him.  _Be inspired by them._

Guan Shan would tell her that some had to work harder than others to achieve the same thing. Some were given exactly what they wanted. Some would never get it at all. Guan Shan was finding it hard to believe he would ever be anything but the latter.

Outside, the rain had stopped, a light grey sky staring down, dirtied water kicking up the back of Guan Shan’s trousers as he walked. Already there were nods and smiles in Jian Yi’s direction, a few people who stopped to pass a word of thanks or a message. Guan Shan stared at the clean press of Jian Yi’s suit, and wondered how many people, like Guan Shan, he’d helped. How many unclean stragglers had he collected from restaurants and hand laundries and brought to a safe place? How many had followed him exhausted and aimless with tension knotted in their bellies? How many had no papers, no money, no clothes, no possessions but some force of will and the only choice but to follow and hope that Jian Yi—that anyone—would bring them coin.

He remembered listening to a conversation between his mother and father once, stowed in the cabinet of his father’s restaurant office, a frequent hideaway rarely discovered.

‘A man is dangerous when he has everything to lose,’ Guan Shan’s father had said. ‘You. Guan Shan. I can’t afford to lose you both. If that doesn’t bring me back to my homeland, I don’t know what will.’

Guan Shan had seen his mother’s hands on her hips through the keyhole.

‘A man is more dangerous when he has nothing to lose,’ she told his father. ‘Don’t become that sort of person. Don’t go. Not all answers are thousands of miles away.’

Guan Shan followed Jian Yi through Chinatown, knowing that he had become that sort of person, wondering if his own answer would be here. If his father, willingly, had stopped sending the letters. Found some new woman, made a new family. Moved west to San Francisco. Or if, as Guan Shan hoped—and dreaded—the contact had stopped unwillingly. If it was the cause of one man, offering serpentine promises and false, holy grail futures.

A verbal contract with no certainties. A fool’s errand. And a mastermind who never signed on the dotted line.

Guan Shan stared around him at the businesses, the men wandering back and forth, the scant women lingering in doorways. In Manhattan—in New York—this enclave was small, growing illicitly bigger. Finding a man with any answers would be difficult, but Guan Shan had a name, and he doubted it would be too hard.

He’d mulled it over on his tongue in Paris, chewed it between his molars like tobacco in Istanbul. Let it seep through his veins like Bangkok heroin and the Toronto winds that slid cold beneath layers of his skin. Let it soak his clothes and run in rivulets from his eyelashes like Manhattan’s clouded skies. Allowed it to keep himself standing, back straight, eyes open when he couldn’t. Fuelled the spite like a hearth in the root of him.

_He Tian._

* * *

‘Where are we going?’ Guan Shan muttered, hiding back a wince from his blistered feet.

Jian Yi glanced at him. ‘That’s usually the first thing people ask before they let me lead them away.’

‘Which tells you what?’

Jian Yi considered. ‘That you’re not _most people_ , or you’re desperate enough right now that you don’t care where we’re going.’

Guan Shan narrowed his eyes. ‘Which is?’

Jian Yi scratched his nose. ‘There are places in this city boarding men twelve to a room, two to a bunk. In others you’ll be lucky to get a bed in an apartment, and you’ll sleep, eat, and cook in that room. Some of us run associations where they’ll charge with interest for helping you set up a business.’

‘The Sam Yup Benevolent Society,’ Guan Shan said, plucking the name from memory. He’d heard about the societies and associations. Organised by family name or origin—or brotherhood. If Guo Wei couldn’t help—if he’d died before Guan Shan reached America, or never received his letter in the first place—Guan Shan would search for the societies. Sam Yup was for the immigrants of Canton.

‘Correct,’ said Jian Yi. He winked at Guan Shan. ‘But  _I_ don’t work for them.’

‘Yeah, who  _do_  you work for?’

Jian Yi spread his hands out and said, ‘I work for me.’

They’d moved out of the back streets and onto Mott Street, where the hub of the town had been growing for his people for fifty years: fire escapes jutting like the roofs of pagodas; restaurant signs for chop suey and fried rice crowding doorways; grocery store windows filled with nuts and barks and sweetmeats and crated tea; tobacco shops and herbal stores and drugstores filling building vacancies every few steps.

‘Guo Wei said you don’t want money,’ Guan Shan said. ‘Which means you’re getting  _nothing_ from this.’

‘Not everyone wants something.’ Jian Yi held up a finger. ‘Not everyone  _needs_ something. I’m lucky to be one of those.’

‘Poor people come here,’ Guan Shan said, stepping out the way of a carriage rolling along the rutted street. ‘People who’ve got no choice but to try and find something better. How can you not need something?’

Jian Yi just smiled, shrugged. Affable. ‘We’re going to my place. It’s just up the street. Hope you won’t mind staying with me.’

‘Your place?’ Guan Shan faltered to a stop. Mistrust clouded his eyes, and unease tugged at the corners of his mouth until his lips pressed to a flat line. ‘This something you usually do?’

Jian Yi chuckled. He raised a hand as if to pat Guan Shan on the arm, then ran a hand through his chin-length hair, thinking better of it. ‘Don’t look so worried, Guan Shan,’ he said. ‘I’ve done it before. Given people a place to stay until they can find their own two feet. It’s better than anything the societies could’ve done for you. Trust me.’

The thing was, Guan Shan  _wanted_ to. Desperately. He wanted to believe everything could be as easy as this—a bed and clean clothes and food a short walk away from the darkened dwellings of Guo Wei’s hand laundry. A few thousand miles away from his own cramped quarters, falling apart at the seams.

The thing was, he knew the Land of Opportunity was a failed pipedream of an earlier generation—they all did. It wasn’t possible that Jian Yi could be offering the real thing.

‘What happens when I leave?’ Guan Shan asked. ‘You’ll come chasing? Say I’ve stolen from you? Owe you money?’

Jian Yi didn’t look offended; his sincerity was almost uncomfortable. ‘On my honour. On my  _family’s_ honour. I swear I won’t do anything to make you lose face. If you want to leave—if you want to go to Sam Yup, you can. I won’t stop you. But give me the benefit of the doubt first, okay?’

Guan Shan took him in—took in Mott Street and New York’s Little China, so misplaced and dissonant with his own home in Guangzhou, with all its odd intricacies and strange imitations and desperate facades of authenticity. Its eagerness to make a home away from home  _home_. Because this country was never meant to be it—this town was never meant to be it. It was a placeholder. A halfway house until the inevitable return, which had become anything but. The pipeline dream: send enough money back home, make enough life for yourself, and then you can go back and settle into a retirement.

Only now there were Exclusion Acts and regulations and oppressions in the false places, and civil wars, brother against brother, in the true ones. It made it difficult to find truth anywhere.

The thing was, Guan Shan had no choice. His  _force of will_ could carry him in only one direction: onwards. Whether a hand appeared over the precipice and pulled him up, or whether he dragged himself up with broken and bloodied fingernails, he had only onwards.

‘Okay,’ he said, and let Jian Yi take him to his new home.

* * *

_Not everyone needs something. I’m lucky to be one of the latter._

Guan Shan understood, the moment Jian Yi unlocked the front door to his house—a three-story brownstone at the end of Mott Street with flowers bursting from the wrought-iron balconies—why he needed nothing.

He had  _everything_.

Guan Shan understood nothing the moment Jian Yi led the way through the parlour and the dining rooms and the library and to Guan Shan’s own bedroom (vases on the rosewood vanity table, sheets of Egyptian cotton, a shelf of untouched books with perfect spines and gilded lettering, paintings on the walls imported from Shanghai—flowers by Chen Shizeng and landscapes from Hunan’s Qi Baishi). It smelled of sweet incense and lingering tobacco smoke, floral and heady and cleaner than anything the streets outside had to offer.

 _How_ did he have everything?

‘You have questions,’ Jian Yi surmised, perched on the end of Guan Shan’s bed, looking amused.

Guan Shan, aware of the sodden hem of his trousers, the dirt caked on his ankles, the plush carpet upon which he stood, said, ‘A fuck ton.’

Jian Yi laughed. ‘Eventually.’ For now, he hooked a thumb across the room and said, ‘There’s a bathroom through that door. Clean clothes in the dresser, and a uniform.’

‘Uniform?’ Guan Shan echoed.

Jian Yi nodded. ‘My friend runs a restaurant,’ he explained. ‘They need wait staff—sometimes a preparer in the kitchens. It’s evening work. The wage is good. Better than any you’ll find in Manhattan. For us, in any case.’

‘I can do that,’ Guan Shan said, almost eagerly. A childhood growing up around his father’s restaurant made it a blessing and a burden, heart aching with rekindled memories. ‘How much of the wage is yours?’

Jian Yi shook his head, holding his hands up. ‘It’s all yours. Really, Guan Shan, you don’t owe me anything. We’re friends. It’s your buffer until you have your own place.’

_Friends._

Guan Shan hesitated, waiting for the catch—for the clause in all of this. He wanted to laugh at himself. He’d been so easily disappointed by Guo Wei’s rejection, but Jian Yi’s eager offers of help were suspicious to him. Happiness was hard to accept when it came, because it made it harder to readjust when it was taken away. Part of him wanted to cry, too. Everything had been set in touchable reach. The impossible seemed so near.

Finding his father seemed  _possible._

‘Why are you helping me? Why do this?’

‘Because I can,’ Jian Yi said, that imbecilic smile forming again that Guan Shan understood was, perhaps, simple kindness. ‘Because I’m loyal to my people. Because I get more than money out of this. Maybe you’ll understand one day. Maybe you won’t. But for now, relax. Wash. Rest. There is food in the kitchens. I’ll tell you more about your employment in the morning.’

Guan Shan nodded at him, and watched him head towards the doorway.

A question sat under Guan Shan’s tongue, unasked and fighting for a voice. He could have asked Guo Wei, but Jian Yi was an easy conversationalist and eager to help. Not a gossip, maybe, but happy to give what was needed. Still, it was a battle. Guan Shan would be showing his hand, something he’d only ever been told to keep close to his chest. The words were held back like a dam.

He let them break.

‘Jian Yi?’ he blurted, pulse thudding in his ears.

Fingers wrapped around the brass, polished door handle, Jian Yi turned, expectant.

Guan Shan cleared his throat, swallowed. ‘What do you know of a man called He Tian?’

A careful pause.

It was the stillness that gave it away—the complete lack of anything. The absence of change. Jian Yi looked at Guan Shan with that same expectant look, and blinked once.

‘No one lives here by that name,’ Jian Yi said, and, without hesitation, shut the door behind him.

Guan Shan stood at the edge of the room like a caged animal, cornered and willing himself to move. A whole room to himself. Bigger, almost, than his home in Guangzhou, shared with his mother and aunt and uncle and their two children. The money from their father’s initial payment lasted a few months, and when it ended, their work in the fields began.

The memories, fatherless and difficult, were unwelcome. Guan Shan forced himself to the bathroom, to strip off the month’s old clothing and scrub himself in the bath until the water ran clean and his skin was red-raw and throbbing with his pulse, mirror clouded with condensation. He dressed in clean linen pyjamas, crawled beneath the sheets, cool and white and clean-pressed, city noise muted through his window, and stared at the low-hanging canopy of the bed.

There must have been ten thousand migrants in New York. A few thousand in Manhattan’s Little China itself. Curious, Guan Shan thought, that Jian Yi would know exactly who  _didn’t_ exist within its boundaries. Curious, and convenient.

Guan Shan swallowed the lump in his throat—some burst of adrenaline, of anger, of thrilling, eager hope.

The man, He Tian, was somewhere, here in this city, and Guan Shan was going to find him.

If he had to, if it came down to it, if revenge needed to be exacted, Guan Shan was going to kill him.

* * *

‘A redhead,’ said Zhan Zhengxi, muttering to himself. ‘The hell is Jian Yi thinking…’

Guan Shan took the pen and notepad that his new employer was handing him, and pocketed it into his waist apron.

‘Is there a problem?’ Guan Shan asked.

Zhengxi glanced at Guan Shan as he led him through the empty restaurant, getting ready to open. It was a large space, low-lit and finely furnished, starched tables and candlesticks and Western cutlery spaced exactly apart. It was larger, more ornate than Guan Shan expected, eyeing the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the piano forte in the corner of the restaurant, but Zhan Zhengxi was Jian Yi’s friend. Their circle was a higher one, gems nestled amongst the muddied, crowded streets of Chinatown.

‘You stand out.’

Guan Shan repeated, ‘Is there a problem?’

He couldn’t have been older than Guan Shan, but Zhan Zhengxi wasn’t like Jian Yi—animated and easily humoured. His personality was a muted one, a stone hard to draw salt from, let alone blood. Guan Shan didn’t mind that, so long as he wasn’t cruel. At Guan Shan’s question, he only pressed his lips in a thinner line, brought his dark brows lower over his bright eyes. It was hard to fathom that he and Jian Yi were friends.

Guan Shan had woken up to an empty house that morning, a note from Jian Yi in the dining room revealing that he would be gone for the day and directions to the restaurant. It sat beside a cast iron pot of tea still hot and sitting on a darkly lacquered tray, accompanied with a bowl of peeled clementines, bayberries, and cut melon.

All day, the house was a silent being, punctured only by the ticking of a grandfather clock at the bottom of the staircase and the murmur of activity on the streets below: trundling carriages and the occasional sounding of an automobile horn, and animated shouting in the doorways of restaurants and drugstores and hand laundries.

‘What part of the city did you say you were from again?’

In the restaurant, Guan Shan shrugged at Zhengxi. ‘I didn’t.’

Zhengxi sighed. ‘Listen. Our clientele is particular. We’re their hidden servers. We talk when we need to, don’t get seen unless they want to see us.’ He pointed at Guan Shan’s head. ‘That makes it impossible.’

‘Are you telling me to dye my hair?’

Zhengxi considered Guan Shan silently. ‘I’m telling you not to draw more attention to yourself than you already do.’

‘Do I seem like the type?’

Zhengxi raised his eyebrows. ‘When you want to, I’m sure.’

Guan Shan had nothing to say to this, and that in itself was enough.

Zhengxi shook his head. ‘We open in an hour. Follow me.’

Zhengxi showed him a plan of the floor, gave him a list of duties, recited the table number structure. He guided Guan Shan around the kitchen, where he would be responsible for dishwashing for the second half of his shift, and showed him the liquor room, a sectioned-off area with dozens of shelves of wine and brandy and gin and liqueurs.

‘What happened to prohibition?’ Guan Shan asked faintly.

Zhengxi said, ‘That’s not something you need to concern yourself with.’

Guan Shan hid the comment away. The reality of this city was making itself abundantly clear: legality was optional, and everyone made their choice—restaurateurs and police officers and governors. Everyone took their risk.

Zhengxi was looking at him. ‘Something to say?’

‘Not right now.’

Zhengxi said, ‘Good.’

* * *

Guan Shan knew he had proved his worth by the time the first half of his shift was done. Zhengxi had nodded at him as Guan Shan carried platters of cheese and grapes out to a table, as he poured a bottle of Merlot and cleared away plates. He served Chinese guests only, his knowledge of English poor and scraped together only from the other people on the freight trains and cargo ships.

Time passed quickly, piano chords flitting through the restaurant, but Guan Shan was grateful when he swapped for kitchen work. He felt exposed serving others, waiting for someone to ask for his papers, waiting for one of his countrymen to start questioning him.

There was another man at Guan Shan’s station when he went into the kitchen, gloves handed to him by the guy who’s position he swapped with, grey hair cut to show the shape of his skull.

He nodded at Guan Shan. ‘You new?’

‘First day,’ Guan Shan said, pulling on the gloves, assessing the stacks of dirty dishes piled beside the sinks. He watched the guy scrub the dishes, rinse them, stack them on a rack. Easy and menial.

‘I’m Wang Shu. Most people just call me Grey.’

‘Mo Guan Shan,’ Guan Shan replied. He didn’t want the conversation; he didn’t want rudeness and irascibility with his colleagues to lose him his job. He made a peace-offering: ‘You new as well?’

Grey shrugged, stacking rinsed side plates on a wire rack. ‘Kind of. A few months. Lucky as hell to be here.’

‘Why’s that?’ Guan Shan asked.

‘The pay,’ Grey said. ‘And Zhengxi covers all our asses here. I dunno how he manages it but he does. My papers should be here in a couple weeks too.’

‘He got you  _papers?_  How?’

Grey said, ‘Loyalty. Do good by others and they’ll do good by you. Our little town is built on favours.’

‘I thought it was money and cigarettes and bootlegged liquor.’

Grey chuckled, inclined his head. ‘That too. But we keep that hush.’

Guan Shan reached for another plate. The work was rhythmic, and painfully reminiscent. How many times had he stood side-by-side with his mother during open hours for the restaurant? How many times had he sat around a table polishing silverware with his father? He hadn’t scorned it when he was a kid; it was work, but it was celebratory. Money in, food bought, another day successful, his parent’s spirits high for a night before the uncertain morning came again.

He and Grey were quiet for most of the shift, listening to orders thrown out by the head chef, Hu Tao, to the cooks, and the trill of piano music that made itself known now and again. Quieter, was the conversation from the guests that wandered through the kitchen door, swinging open and shut, the docile questions of the wait staff, the liquid sound of drinks poured and cigarettes lit and plates set down.

The restaurant was closing up when Grey muttered, ‘I wouldn’t mind all this if we weren’t cleaning up the other room’s shit, too.’

Guan Shan paused. ‘Other room?’

Grey froze, stared at Guan Shan wide-eyed. After a moment, he sighed, dropped the plate he was washing into the sink water. ‘Aw, fuck.’

‘There’s another room in this place?’ Guan Shan pressed.

Grey’s eyes darted about. Out the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Downstairs. But we don’t talk about it. Only…  _certain_ people are allowed down there. There’s another entrance for those customers.’

Guan Shan’s gaze roamed the kitchen, waiting for a door or set of stairs to miraculously reveal itself.

‘How do you get down there?’

He lowered his eyes. ‘I don’t know. I’ve asked but… it’s not worth it. None of the staff up here get sent down, even if they ask Zhengxi. Guess he doesn’t want to lose us to it all. It’s dangerous shit from what I’ve heard.’

‘What have you heard?’

He shrugged. ‘Drugs, whores, fraud. The usual tong bullshit.’

Exactly the kind of thing Guan Shan’s father had gotten caught up in, putting his faith in the wrong people, dealing in opium and false promises, a material future built on blood money and politicians who were bought as easily as sex.

‘I don’t like that look on your face.’

Guan Shan glanced at the grey-haired man. ‘Look?’

‘Like you’re about to do something stupid that’s gonna get us all fired.’

Guan Shan rolled his eyes. ‘I’m not gonna fuck with you all like that. If I get burnt, it’s all gonna come down with me.’

He shook his head. ‘You want to see it so bad? Just for the thrill?’

‘I have my reasons.’

‘Yeah, well, they’d better be fucking good ones, friend,’ Grey muttered. ‘Jobs like this one don’t come easy. You’d be lucky as shit to find something with this kind of pay. And a decent employer.’

Guan Shan’s eyes slid to meet his. ‘If he’s so decent, what’s Zhengxi doing holding a den under his restaurant, huh?’

‘It’s not his, it’s—’ Grey cleared his throat, lowered his voice. ‘His friend Jian Yi’s the one who owns it. Owns the restaurant too.’

Realisation lit up in Guan Shan’s mind. ‘That’s how he can afford the brownstone.’

‘On Mott Street? Because of this place?’ Grey snorted. ‘Nah. Because he does favours for people that get him rewards. Because of who is father is.’ He tilted his head. ‘And because of the guy that rents downstairs from him.’

‘What guy?’

Grey shrugged. ‘Don’t know his name. Some spiffy guy from San Fran, last I heard. I’ve seen him once or twice, I think. Not long enough to get a good look. His car, though…’ Grey let out a low whistle.

‘What does he look like?’

‘The car or the guy?’

Guan Shan gritted his teeth. ‘The  _guy,_ Grey.’

‘Tall. Dark hair. Swanky as hell—not like us coolies. Uses a cane.’

‘A cane?’ Guan Shan asked, intrigue burning. ‘He’s a gimp?’

‘Didn’t look like one. Far as I heard, he breaks backs with it.’

Guan Shan’s hands stilled under the water. Grey said the words with undeterred ease, the tone a shrug would carry with it if spoken aloud.

 _Breaks backs with it_.

What sort of person was Jian Yi dealing with? What sort of person had his father been dealing with?

Guan Shan saw it clearly: his father curled on the floor, the image of him hazy now, the toe of a polished shoe pressing into his wrist, the end of a cane angled into the base of his spine, a suited silhouette looming over with a sneer.

If the man Guan Shan was describing was He Tian, then his father must have been mad to play delivery-boy for someone like him. Must have known exactly what risks he was taking, and what the stakes were. What it would mean if things went awry—if he couldn’t keep up his end of the bargain.

His father ran a restaurant for most of his life. He wasn’t the kind of person He Tian needed.

Except maybe he was.

A father desperate to support his family. To put food on their table even if he starved. Was there a more perfect candidate than a man who would do anything for his family? Even if he died?

‘Fuck, are you okay?’

Startled, Guan Shan looked to where Grey was staring.

The water in the sink had turned red, and Guan Shan only faintly recognised the stinging pain in the palm of his hand, wrapped around the blade of a chef’s knife. He let go.

‘Yeah, fine,’ Guan Shan muttered, pulling the plug from the sink, bloodied water swirling down the sink hole. ‘It’s shallow.’ He held his hand up from the water; a watery, pinkish line trailed down his palm, his wrist, his forearm. It was barely bleeding, but it stung.

‘You should go fix yourself up,’ said Grey, staring at the wrinkled flesh of Guan Shan’s hand, the ridged welt of the knife’s cut down the meat of his palm. His eyes had gone wide and still. ‘I’ll finish up here.’

Guan Shan, about to protest, paused. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Just make sure you hide that well tomorrow. Zhengxi will get shit for putting blood in the clientele’s  _fillet mignon_.’

Guan Shan snorted. ‘I’ll remember that,’ he said. He threw his dishtowel in the laundry basket, hung up his waist apron, and grabbed a serviette to wrap his hand in.

Beyond the kitchen, the restaurant was empty, tables cleared and laid out for the following day, the light under Zhengxi’s office door switched off. The orange glow of a street lamp shone in the front windows, a glow leaking beneath the kitchen doors. Guan Shan could hear Grey humming to himself faintly, something American to be danced to, and then, fainter, the same song in actuality. A string of female singing, the plucky thrum of a double bass and the smooth sounding of a saxophone.

The den.

It was lifting up from beneath the restaurant, unheard during Guan Shan’s shift when the pianist’s music filled the restaurant, and talk and laughter filtered through the space.

But now, in the midnight silence, Guan Shan heard it.

He stood still, felt the vibration of the music, heard a faint peal of laughter—and the slight, twinkling trill of shaking glass.

Guan Shan paced to the liquor room.

Among the shelves of brandy and whisky and rum, the criss-crossed frame of the wine bottles shivered most, jazz running up Guan Shan’s arm as he wrapped his good hand around a wooden beam, and gave it a slight tug.

It came away easily, light leaking through the hidden doorway, the low hum of music a sudden blare through the restaurant. Guan Shan slipped inside, door sealed behind him, and stared down the staircase. The soft orange light of the street outside had turned dark and crimson in the stairwell, a curtain of silk covering an archway at the bottom of the stairs.

Guan Shan crept down, pulled it aside, and stared.

It was a bar.

Brick-walled and dark, the left side taken up with a stretched surface of lacquered cherry wood and bottles of liquor. Glittering chandeliers hung from the ceiling; waiters weaved through wooden tables and approached leather sofas clutching the back walls and corners.

It was not the restaurant. There was no carefully cultivated reputation here. Here, the gowns were shorter, the headdresses gaudy, the cigarette smoke choking, cloying with opium clouds and the burning scent of spilled liquor—sticky hardwood floors, bodies pressed against bodies, white and brown and black indiscriminate under the low light, humour breathed into an open ear, favours passed into another, a hand searching for a hand under a table—for the slope of an ankle, the meat of a thigh, higher—others trading pills and powders and pocket-sized revolvers.

On the far-right side, a stage was built to hold a jazz band, a black woman in a gold-sequined gown singing in English, throaty and slow and hypnotic, saxophone a sultry reverberation through the bar, piano a chiming accompaniment.

Guan Shan swallowed it all like sweet poison in a second’s glimpse, felt nauseous with the fill of it all that slid down his throat, sluggish and sticky.

There were girls with diamonds and girls with their breasts on show and girls with both, men dealing arms and men dealing drugs and men kissing other men. Politicians and debutants and policemen and daughters of ambassadors and sons of anarchists and dealers and attorneys, and in the middle of it, arms stretched across the back of a studded leather sofa against the opposite wall—

He Tian.

Just like Grey had said.

Tall and dark and ritzy and handsome in a way that was painful. He wore his three-piece suit like a costume, and Guan Shan couldn’t stop staring at the cane, black cherry wood shaft and golden handle leaning against his thigh.

Guan Shan watched him, the precise movements of cigarette to mouth, the exhale, thumb brushing at the edge of a sharp jaw. There were others who watched him, too—sideways glances of intrigue, subversive looks of hunger and envy, hidden anger, an emotion simmering that Guan Shan knew well. And He Tian stared back at them, aware and arrogant and at ease. If he’d thought to look across the room, his shadowed eyes would meet Guan Shan’s.

Guan Shan’s would say:  _You brought my father here. And if I have to, I’ll kill—_

‘You. Clicquot at Mr He’s table. Clean glasses, too.’

Guan Shan startled out of the reverie. Command given to Guan Shan, the uniformed man was already walking away. Guan Shan stared down at himself—realised he’d left the confines of the curtained stairwell. Realised his uniform was the same as any other waiter in the place. An easy mistake; an easy, effortless disguise.

The opportunity had presented itself, a jade gem at the bottom of Guan Shan’s pocket, unfathomable and bright with the green beauty of envy. Of poison. Of spite.

Given his orders, Guan Shan straightened himself. He approached the bar, shoving the bloodied serviette in his pocket. The barman, pouring martinis into cold glasses, flicked his eyes up at Guan Shan. Looked at his hair, light above setting the colour aflame. Frowned.

‘Who’re y—’

‘I need a bottle of Clicquot for Mr He,’ Guan Shan said, voice raised over the music, growing steadier and fluid. The wavering of his throat went unheard. ‘And glasses.’

The barman looked between Guan Shan and the full table in the centre of the room, weighing some internal struggle. Eventually, he shrugged.

Another waiter plucked the tray of prepared martinis from the bar’s surface, and Guan Shan took the champagne and flutes.

The bottle was cold and sweating in Guan Shan’s hands, and his shirt felt wet, soaked to his back under the waistcoat. His pulse skipped in his throat, palpitations distracting as he made his way to the back wall at the centre of the bar.

Guan Shan’s muscles were aching with the strained tension in his body; he was conscious of every step.  _Mr He_  ran through his head like a wound-up music box on repeat. Guan Shan had travelled thousands of miles to find him, and he’d been presented to Guan Shan like a fine bottle of wine. Knowing it was him, knowing he existed and he was in this room—Guan Shan felt everything inside of him, kept so closely guarded, starting to catch flame.

No one looked at Guan Shan as he approached. It was as Zhengxi had said: he wouldn’t be seen unless they wanted to see him. He set the glasses down on the table, standing between two white woman smoking cigarettes with holders, hands shaking, poured the champagne, sloshing slightly. No one noticed.

Guan Shan kept his head down while he filled the glasses and they talked and laughed and traded what sounded like snide remarks in English. He Tian was a dark presence in the corner of his eye, a hand resting on the table that was manicured and clean and bruised at the knuckles. Guan Shan flicked his eyes up—and froze.

He Tian was staring at Guan Shan.

He said, ‘I haven’t seen you here before.’

Inside, silently, Guan Shan burned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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	2. righteousness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This fic was requested by Tracey! ([Tumblr](http://teanshan.tumblr.com/) | [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/users/traceytries))
> 
> [Find me on Tumblr.](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)

‘Are you slow?’ He Tian said, flicking out the fingers of his left hand towards Guan Shan. ‘Or mute?’

His table of companions was looking at him, a collective cocktail of embarrassment and ridicule written on their faces, and Guan Shan shook his head. He held the half-empty bottle of champagne to his chest like a shield.

‘I’m new, sir,’ he said, realising in the ashen silence in his head that he didn’t know what to do.

It was never meant to be like this, exposed and overtly public. Guan Shan may as well have been standing where the jazz band played, whispering into a microphone, spotlights blistering his skin like sunburn. Throwing out accusations now would pull him into the restaurant’s back alley with his throat slit and intestines hanging out between his ribs. He Tian’s dark, watchful eyes promised he’d have no trouble exacting the punishment.

In the onset of quiet, of rapt attention like a Colosseum audience, Guan Shan acknowledged that he had no particular plan for handling this. Everything had lead up to this moment, but not the moment itself. And whatever it would have been, this wasn’t it. Too easy, too close. He Tian sat right before him, the subject of his father’s demise—the uncompromising cause of it, one man against another.

Did He Tian recognise Guan Shan? Did he see the resemblance in their jawlines where He Tian might once have landed a fist? Was there the same fired agony curling smoke through their eyes?

This was supposed to be covert and hidden, some darkened room where Guan Shan had the freedom to find the truth he knew he wouldn’t get tonight, one-on-one. Some position of power that Guan Shan had so naively thought he’d had when he strode down the stairwell and held the bottle of Clicquot aloft at He Tian’s table.

_The dangerous men are those with nothing to lose._

He hadn’t been dangerous; he’d been foolish.

‘This isn’t right,’ he whispered. Aloud.

_Fuck._

‘Will you all excuse me,’ He Tian said, and then echoed the same in English. He stood without support from his cane, buttoned the suit jacket at the joining of his waistcoat, and stubbed his half-finished cigarette fastidiously into the ashtray on the table.

‘Need help, boss?’

He Tian waved off the man who had stood, the motion enough to get him to sit back down with a thump.

Even beneath the tar-like cloud of smoke that clung to the room, the musk of He Tian’s pomade was cutting as he took an iron grip on Guan Shan’s bicep and tugged him towards the bar, and beside it, a door.

The music didn’t stop; the drinks continued flowing; the conversation and bawdy laughter never ceased. Guan Shan wasn’t a spectacle of the evening—he was an inconvenience to be swiftly dealt with. He Tian’s grip on his arm promised that he would be.

‘Sir—’ Guan Shan started, entirely ineffective. He Tian moved like a freight train towards the door, unstoppable and uninterrupted, and Guan Shan had no strength to derail him.

Door open, Guan Shan was roughly shoved inside, and He Tian locked it with a practiced motion behind him while Guan Shan heaved breath into his lungs, bracing himself.

They stared at each other.

‘Take a seat,’ said He Tian, voice floating darkly into the office. It carried the same aesthetic as the bar, all dark woods and studded leather seating, a huge lacquered desk facing the door that must have been imported from China. Light trickled in from the bar outside, and an old oil lamp sat glowing in the corner beside a glass cabinet. Guan Shan could see his own reflection in it; pale and wide-eyed and caged.

There were no windows, no more doors. The office was serenely private, and Guan Shan had nowhere to run. He stumbled across the room, his pulse pounding like a drum in his ears, stomach rolling, his shaking threatening to tear his chest apart. He Tian’s own heels clicking on the floor in tandem at Guan Shan’s back like a soldier’s march—or a death knell.

Guan Shan slowly lowered himself into one of the two chairs facing the desk, feet planted on the hardwood floor, fingers curled like talons around the arms of the chair until the edges of the wood ached into his palms. He thought that the practiced firing of a revolver probably wouldn’t be heard beyond the confines of the office.

He Tian leant his cane on the desk beside Guan Shan, and extracted a bottle of cognac and two glasses from the cabinet. Bottle unscrewed, Guan Shan watched as amber liquid spilled freely, the silence painful, conscious of every movement He Tian made. His lungs ached with the effort of breathing so slowly, barely letting his chest rise.

‘It’s an 1883 bottle,’ He Tian informed Guan Shan, handing him a glass, like they were friends. ‘Drink up.’

‘No,’ said Guan Shan, instinct trapping his words, and then, ‘Sir. But thank you.’ He put the glass on the desk.

He Tian looked at the glass for a moment, weighing something internally, then shrugged in a harmless  _suit yourself_ kind of way. He wandered around to the other side of the desk, and reached down to pull open a drawer.

Guan Shan froze.

‘Do you smoke?’ said He Tian, and placed a humidor on the desk from the drawer. A neat row of fatly rolled cigars stared up at Guan Shan. In his hand, He Tian held a guillotine cutter, large enough to just fit the cap of a cigar through—or a finger.

Guan Shan tightened his fingers on the chair arms, resisted the temptation to sit on his hands.

‘I don’t,’ he said.

The humidor lid slammed down.

‘That’s a shame,’ said He Tian, seating himself in the desk chair and lighting up a cigarette, face alight with the orange glow of a flame for a handful of seconds, guillotine thrown against the desk with a dull clatter, Guan Shan’s eyes on him as a constant. ‘It’s important for me to give guests something they want when they’re in my company. It makes everything so much easier.’ He motioned towards Guan Shan with a hand; his smile was polite and excruciating. ‘That’s what you are, isn’t it? A guest? Because—’ At this, he chuckled and shook his head, a strand of slicked back hair falling into his face, an oil spill on his skin. ‘—you’re  _certainly_ not someone in my employ, are you?’

Guan Shan swallowed the knife digging its way around his throat, and felt the slow, burning drag of it down the middle of him, copper and acid welling at his core until he choked on it.

Guan Shan spoke through his teeth. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘There’s no need for lies,’ He Tian interrupted. Smoke crept around him like cold breath in winter, curling and hard to breathe through. ‘Not with me. I know every name and every face in this city, but not yours. I know every name and every face in my employ, but not yours.’ He drummed his fingers on his desk, a steady metronome, and Guan Shan was almost grateful for the motion. He thought stillness would have given way to the panicked pulsing of his own heart. He Tian said, ‘Why is it that I don’t know you?’

Guan Shan said, ‘I dyed my hair.’

The drumming stopped.

He Tian stared at him, cigarette burning down to ash that was ready to break over his fingers. His thoughts were loud, and they built the silence around them both.

Was Guan Shan stupid? Did he think someone like  _He Tian_ was stupid?

It was a silence that told Guan Shan he was going to be lucky to get out of this room, let alone find out anything about his father. A silence of sharp edges and dull realisations, like a memory played on repeat before sleep, the regret of words said and the fear of words unsaid, happening in hazy recollection.

Guan Shan closed his eyes. ‘I just wanted to work for you.’

Without inflection, ‘Why.’

‘I heard you were good to work for and—’

‘Who did you hear this from?’

‘What—’

‘That I was  _good to work for._ Who…’ He Tian ran his tongue over his teeth. Something seemed amusing to him. ‘Who rolled my name off their tongue so willingly?’

Guan Shan’s mouth went desert-dry. Sand grains settled in the crooks of his elbows, the bend of his knees, skin sun-blistered and gasping, a dust storm snatching words from his head in its wake.

‘Zhan Zhengxi.’

Betrayal soaked Guan Shan’s mouth like gasoline. The desert roared purple light and glass showers instead of rain, and Guan Shan waited for them to start shredding his skin to bloodied ribbons.

He Tian was leaning back in his chair, eyes flicked up as if he could see through the ceiling to Zhengxi’s office. ‘Really,’ he said flatly. And then, getting to his feet, collecting his cane, ‘Wait here.’

‘No, wait,’ Guan Shan blurted, torso twisting in his chair. ‘I lied. Zhengxi told me nothing. It wasn’t him. It was street talk. My mother’s sick.’

He Tian stayed standing. ‘Your mother’s sick,’ he echoed.

‘I heard you paid the best in the city. I have experience in catering. I need this or I’m dead and my mother’s dead too.’

He Tian looked down at him, the towering, benevolent god robed in black. The man who might’ve put the end of his cane in Guan Shan’s father’s back.

‘I’m not sure I see how any of this is my problem.’

He didn’t know how it happened, where the motion occurred—was it thought or action with afterthought? The aftershock of hardwood flooring on his knees buried him in realisation, followed swiftly by the bruising and and almost-fracturing, and his breath was momentarily stolen from him. He dragged it in with pained gasps, hid it against the floor as he bowed his back, nearly vomiting with the degradation weighing on his spine.

‘Please,’ he pushed out, not raising his eyes enough to stare at the glossed reflection of himself in He Tian’s shoes. ‘I have experience. I can be useful to you. Do whatever you need. Whatever you want. I need this.’

Guan Shan didn’t dare to look up in the silence that followed. He could feel He Tian’s eyes boring down onto him, heard the creek of leather, a smashed glass outside in the bar, his own heartbeat pounding in his head.

‘Get up,’ He Tian muttered, gaze averted. ‘Don’t debase yourself like that. It means nothing to me.’

Uncertain, Guan Shan gathered himself to his feet. He met He Tian’s eyes, black as coal pits, and felt his fingernails bite crescents into his palm. This close, Guan Shan realised how much taller he was—noticed, too, the sharp nicks on the underside of the man’s jaw like razor cuts, the raised white line of a scar sneaking down his shirt collar, the ruby hilted dagger used as a tie pin, the sleek impression of a revolver in his jacket pocket.

There were many ways to kill a man, and He Tian carried more.

‘Do you have papers?’ He Tian asked.

Uncertain, Guan Shan said, ‘I got into the city yesterday.’

He Tian looked at him, the colour of Guan Shan’s hair, the severe lines of his jaw. ‘One day in and already causing trouble.’

‘Sir?’

He Tian said, ‘Here’s the deal. If you fuck up, you’re out. Do you understand?’

Guan Shan understood. He’d understood that the moment he crept down the stairwell.

‘I don’t do something like this often. But I like you.’ He Tian raised his hand, and Guan Shan forced himself not to flinch at the smack he was waiting for. Instead, he felt the steady trail of a fingertip running along his jawline, calloused and rough on Guan Shan’s skin. He Tian’s breath washed over him, rich tobacco and stinging cognac.

‘There’s a fire in you,’ He Tian told him quietly.

His grip tightened, crushing, Guan Shan’s jaw trapped in He Tian’s hold until it ached. Head forcibly tilted up, the cigarette held between He Tian’s fingers snaked smoke into Guan Shan’s eyes until they stung and watered.

‘But know that if you burn me,’ He Tian murmured, ‘which I’m expecting you will, I will pour gasoline over you and  _gladly_ watch you burn.’

Seconds ticked by, the world outside continuing obliviously as Guan Shan was rendered immobile, breathing in smoke and feeling like his jaw was about to break, He Tian’s hold bruising—and then he was released.

He staggered back, lungs empty.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said on an inhale.

He Tian’s flat expression soured. ‘You can stop calling me that. It doesn’t suit you when there’s something else sitting behind it.’

‘I don’t know what you—’

‘You do. But you’ve been caught out, so you’ll keep up the facade because you can’t afford anything else. I told you, Guan Shan. Don’t lie to me.’

Guan Shan felt the blood leak from his face. His pulse hammered. ‘Thought you didn’t know my name.’

‘You’re right. I didn’t.’ He Tian drew in smoke. ‘Until  _Jian Yi_  came and told me he had a new resident on Mott Street this morning. He was excited. He couldn’t understand why I was so curious about someone who wouldn’t reach out to the societies. It’s almost like you didn’t want to be known.’

Regret washed over Guan Shan in muted waves. He should never have mentioned He Tian’s name last night. He squared himself, resolute. ‘I could say the same for you.’

Surprise, at first, some mild shock that He Tian hadn’t dug his claws into well enough. And then something darker, like He Tian was considering how long it would take to suck a bruise to the surface of Guan Shan’s neck. A smile worked at the curling edges of He Tian’s mouth.

‘You could,’ He Tian said. ‘But anyone who knows me  _knows_ me. I can’t say the same for you.’

‘Jian Yi said he’d never heard your name before.’

He Tian tapped ash into the tray and angled his cigarette in Guan Shan’s direction. ‘You should learn from him.’

Guan Shan didn’t ask why Jian Yi had lied. It was blatantly obvious what Jian Yi had been protecting—Zhengxi, a shred of integrity, and himself. The bar was a hub of high-profile sinners whose faces would do well printed in mugshot sepia for the next morning’s newspaper scandal. Their integrity relied on Jian Yi staying hush about who visited the basement of his restaurant to share a certain man’s company.

‘Tell me what you want me to do for you,’ Guan Shan said. ‘If you want me to be a waiter, I’ll wait. If you want me to be your bodyguard, I’ll shield you. Just tell me what I can do.’

‘So eager to serve.’

 _Eager to be close to you,_ Guan Shan thought. Eager to find any opportunity he could to find out what happened to his father without asking. Eager to get a knife to He Tian’s throat if the time came. If he asked—if He Tian had been the one to sign a contract for heroin smuggled into the Americas and Guan Shan admitted knowledge of it, how much longer before Guan Shan’s bloated body would float up onto the banks of the Hudson, nameless and paperless and dumped into an anonymous grave?

But Guan Shan had realised something in being here, in standing before He Tian and catching the attention of a man like him.

He wasn’t going to get out of this alive. He wasn’t going to get to leave when he had enough, knew enough. If he got back to China, it would be on He Tian’s orders, and he didn’t doubt that He Tian would have the power to drag him back if he went too far.

_You’re overestimating your worth._

‘I’ll have my accountant come to Jian Yi’s place tomorrow. You’ll negotiate a salary and draw up the terms of your contract.’

‘D’you have contracts with all your employees?’ Guan Shan asked shrewdly.

He Tian rubbed a thumb at the corner of his mouth while he eyed Guan Shan. He pulled one final burn from his cigarette before stubbing it out with the others and said, ‘Only the ones I want to keep tabs on.’

‘Why bother with a contract?’ Guan Shan asked. ‘You’ll kill me anyway if I void the terms. You’ve made that really fucking clear.’

‘The contract isn’t for you, Guan Shan.  _You_ might not have papers, but I’m not going to spit in the eye of my aides.’

‘You mean your dirty cop friends?’

He Tian smiled. ‘Everyone’s dirty in this city, Guan Shan. And now, so are you.’

* * *

Neon bile splattered on the brick wall in front of him, barely evading his shoes. Acid ripped through his throat, eyes streaming, and Guan Shan felt the earthquake start in himself, shifting foundations and broken plates that made his thighs buckle beneath him.

He grabbed onto the wall, knuckles blistering against brick and mortar, fingertips struggling for purchase in an effort to stay standing. Vomit trickled out the side of his mouth and down his chin, and he heaved out labour breaths that shuddered through him.

 _‘Fuck,’_  he whispered, blinking through tears.

Autumn rolled a chilled wind through the streets of Chinatown, but Guan Shan’s skin was fever-hot and sweat-soaked from running so many blocks from the restaurant, the top button of his shirt broken off somewhere into the gutter to expose his throat, pulse threatening to break through his skin.

It was the adrenaline come-down, the end of his bold-faced lies and virgin attempts at deception, a poison persona that shoved a hand down his throat and brought up the empty contents of his stomach.

He Tian was beyond him, some entity of a world Guan Shan had never bordered or entered and had never wanted to. There was a seeping dishonesty to him, a septic wound of cordite and stolen whisky kisses and tobacco in his fingerprints. He was a sickness, and Guan Shan would never be immune.

‘Hey! Don’t be throwing up in my alleyway! You’ll scare off the customers.’

Guan Shan looked over his shoulder to the man at the end of the alley, shadowed by towered buildings and overhead wires and the bleeding light of a weak moon.

 _Fuck off,_ he thought, groaning mentally.

‘Your alleyway?’ Guan Shan called out instead, breathing through his mouth, lips wet with spit and throat sore with vomit that was searing his gums. ‘Thought this was public property.’

‘Oh good, you can listen,’ the man said. ‘Guess that means you’re not drunk.’

‘I wish,’ Guan Shan muttered, pushing himself away from the wall. His staggering begged to differ, limbs weak and trembling; his body felt vacant.

‘Well, you look like you could do with one.’

Guan Shan grimaced as he stumbled towards the street, wiping his mouth in his shirt sleeve. ‘Got no money,’ he told the man. ‘Especially not for bootleg liquor.’

The man shrugged. ‘I’ll give you one on me.’

Up close, Guan Shan could see the tired face, thirty-ish, a grease-stained shirt that had long lost its colour, the limpish smile shaping thin lips. A bruise bloomed violently across his right eye, and Guan Shan noted the wince as the guy threw half a dozen trash bags into a dumpster with an aborted swing.

‘Look like you could do with one too,’ Guan Shan remarked.

The guy waved a hand in a dismissive downwards gesture. ‘Work with something enough and it’ll steal the pleasure.’ He said, ‘Come on, brother. It’s on the house.’

Guan Shan needed sleep, to pilfer Jian Yi’s half-empty pantry and make use of his expendable hot water and crawl beneath sheets he probably wouldn’t be granted much longer. But he followed the man out of the alleyway and onto the street, throat dry and body enduring that particular emptiness that was singular to purging one’s innards out into a dirtied backstreet.

‘Welcome to the local watering hole,’ the man said, pushing the door of a corner building open with his shoulder.

The ‘watering hole’ was a dim-lit hallway disguised as a café, metal tables cluttered on one side and a cracked slab of wood serving for a bar on the other. A huddle of old men sat in bar stools at the counter, drinking coffee-coloured  _huanjiu_ from chipped ceramic mugs and burning their way through the tobacco in their long-stemmed pipes, while a gramophone warbled  _shidaiqu_ music in the far corner of the bar. Burnt sesame oil and rice wine vinegar leaked its way out of a back kitchen, and Guan Shan’s stomach churned at the combination of cooking oils and tobacco smoke that hit him as the door shut behind him.

‘American drinker or local drinker?’ the alleyway guy asked him, situating himself behind the bar.

A mirror stretched across the wall behind the counter, scratched and worn at the edges, photos of Guan Shan’s home growing faded and curled in the same fashion as the bar—men in farming gear and soft family portraits and a young girl with her arms elbow-deep in starched rice water.

Guan Shan drew his eyes away from his reflection, pale skin stretched tight over his bones, a startled look like a camera bulb had flashed and blown his pupils too wide, whites showing around the edges.

‘Neither,’ Guan Shan said.

The barman gave Guan Shan the weighted look of someone who’d just seen him puking his guts up behind the bar. He extracted a clear bottle from beneath the counter and tipped it upwards into a shot glass. ‘Russian it is, then,’ he said, and slid it forward. ‘Drink up, Moonshine.’

Guan Shan eyed the glass set before him with the look of someone who’d just puked his guts up behind a bar and wasn’t sure he could stomach anything else.

He lifted it to his lips with noticeably shaking fingers, and tipped it back.

The burn was immediate and gratuitous, and the answering fire in his belly made his fingernails dig into the wood of the bar until they were close enough to crack.

‘That bad, huh?’ the barman asked. He poured another, and Guan Shan praised himself that he didn’t reach for it immediately.

‘Something like that,’ Guan Shan muttered.

The guy shook his head, throwing a towel over his shoulder. ‘Take a seat. Stay a while ‘til you’ve got your head screwed on straight. Can’t have you stumbling around Mott Street while they’re patrolling.’

‘Patrolling?  _Again,_ Xui Ying?’

Guan Shan slid into a vacant bar stool and glanced down to the end of the bar. One of the old guys had pulled the stem of a pipe from his mouth and had it pointed in Xui Ying’s direction, an unruly grey eyebrow raised.

Xui Ying spread his hands. ‘Don’t look at me, Pa. Can’t tell the cops what to do around here anymore. Three murders in a week doesn’t do us many favours.’

His father grumbled, the other men shifting in their seats around him, aged and grey. ‘Like it’s any different to the past fifty years. The tongs’ve been at each other’s throat since they left China. And over what? Gambling? Prostitution? Opium?’

‘It’s more than that, Pa,’ Xui Ying said, head shaking as he wiped over the bar surface.

‘A dead woman,’ another of the men cut in, head shaved, a scar cleaving his skull in two down the middle like he’d been struck by an axe. ‘A murdered laundryman. Whatever happened to the righteousness of protecting each other from outsiders when we start needing to protect each other from ourselves?’

‘It’s  _pride_ , gentlemen,’ Xui Ying interjected. He pointed a finger at the men. ‘And it’s hard to win that in a war.’

‘That’s not it,’ said another of the men bitterly. ‘It’s hard to keep throwing money at Tammany Hall and expecting more than they can give.’

Guan Shan leaned over to Xui Ying. ‘What’s Tammany Hall?’ he murmured.

Xui Ying filled Guan Shan’s glass and propped an elbow on the bar. ‘It’s the political machine of New York politics,’ he told him quietly. ‘Patroned half the Irish immigrants that came here. Get a politician in your pocket from Tammany and you’ll have New York in there too.’

Guan Shan swallowed this with the rest of his vodka. He winced and bowed his head.

The men were still talking.

‘At least it’s not as bad as the Gold Coast.’

Xui Ying snorted and wandered over with a bottle of  _huanjiu_. ‘Like you’d all be here if there were any gold left,’ he said, refilling glasses dutifully. He raised the bottle to his father. ‘Like you would have brought me here if San Francisco weren’t as much of a blood bath, Pa.’

‘Sun Xui Ying—’

‘He’s right, Sun Zhi,’ said the man with the scar. ‘You think a man like He Tian would have turned up on Pell Street if San Fran was safe for him to be in?’

A hush draped itself over the bar like a death sheet, and Guan Shan went still. The music lost its rhythm, base sound blaring out, too loud without the talk, or the sound of mugs and glasses smacking down on the bar. Guan Shan was grateful for the drink in his hand, for Xui Ying’s heavy-handedness. What was the penalty for that openness, for He Tian’s name to be thrown out, he wondered. What was the consequence for speaking freely when it came to someone who traded in blood and bullet wounds?

‘He Tian’s a young upstart,’ Sun Zhi said. ‘Bloody and cunning, he might be. But he’s young. He wasn’t afraid of the tongs on the west coast. The east coast—New York—is about  _expansion._ He’s here because there’s  _opportunity_. Because the Hip Sings and On Leongs are at war and he’s ready when the power vacuum forms itself.’

‘In the midst of chaos,’ said Xui Ying wryly, ‘there is also opportunity.’

Sun Zhi waved a hand towards his son, who was lighting up a cigarette behind the bar, hip propped up against the counter.

‘I present my son, Sun Tzu.’

Laughter bubbled slowly from the men, an air of uncertainty still lingering like cigarette smoke, cloying and staining their clothes, soaking up wool fibres and saturating wood.

But the humour didn’t last long. It was the scarred man again, hunched over and whirling liquor in his cup while he spoke.

‘Times are gonna change around here for the white folk,’ he said lowly. ‘And when they do, we’re gonna be hit the worst. I’d rather be with the tongs than against them when that happens.’

Xui Ying made a frustrated sound. ‘Don’t scare away my customers, Wang Jun,’ he complained.

Sun Zhi snorted, waving a hand around the place. ‘Customers? Your old man’s drinking pals and some kid on opium?’

 _Some kid on opium_. Guan Shan kept his head down. If that’s what they thought he was—who they thought he was—then he’d take the insult. Pale skin and blown pupils and an open throat to pour spirits down. Maybe opium was the better alternative than admitting it was only a man that had him shaken and uprooted from his foundations like a tree torn apart by lightning, He Tian a storm cloud collapsed inside a tailored suit.

 _‘Come on, Wang Jun,’_  Xui Ying implored. ‘I’m trying to make a  _business_ here.’

The tension lifted, petty banter thrown between Xui Ying and his father’s friends in an attempt to dissolve it. Guan Shan ran a hand over his face. His head was starting to swim, and he was threatening himself with the act of standing up and not falling back onto his knees.

The memory burgeoned again, unasked for: prostration of himself in front of He Tian like a worshipper before a god, bloody and cunning. Guan Shan didn’t need the old men’s commentary to understand what sort of man He Tian was, but it was surface knowledge built on preconceptions and gossip from old men, and Guan Shan was lacking anything concrete.

 _In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity_ , Xui Ying had said, but Guan Shan remembered another line from Sun Tzu’s  _Art of War._

_If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle._

Guan Shan barely knew his enemy—not well enough. Not yet. Drunk, exhausted, holed up in some decrepit watering hole in the middle of New York’s Chinatown, Guan Shan wasn’t sure he knew who he was himself at all.

‘Got your liquid courage back?’

Guan Shan blinked up at Xui Ying, vision hazy. He could feel himself swaying to the music, a synth mix of jazz and traditional folk that Guan Shan was torn by—the allure of the western voice and the plucky music of his home. He resisted shutting one eye so he could focus on the man in front of him. Resisted closing both so he could pretend he was there, sitting in the kitchen while his mother hummed along to the strings of a zither.

‘Somethin’ like that,’ he told Xui Ying.

His words slurred slightly, and he breathed out through his mouth as Xui Ying chuckled, reaching for Guan Shan’s glass again.

‘No,’ Guan Shan said, putting a hand over it. ‘No more.’

Xui Ying shrugged, stepping backwards. ‘Your call, brother,’ he said, screwing the cap back on the bottle. ‘Whatever you want.’

‘I want to go back.’

‘You need a cab?’

Guan Shan shook his head, cottony and thick. Thinking was suddenly impossible. ‘No money.’

‘You’re good, brother. I’ve got you.’

Xui Ying was suddenly there, at his side, a hand around his shoulders and pulling him up from the barstool. Guan Shan went willingly, stumbling, as Xui Ying led him towards the door.

A ruby-red automobile was purring on the street in front of Sun Xui Ying’s bar, headlights spilling low onto the damp sidewalk, the passenger door already open, a uniformed driver letting his arm rest on the rolled-down window.

‘Of course the fucker sends a Model A,’ Xui Ying sighed, pausing momentarily to admire the car, still reeking of factory paint and engine grease and new leather. He helped Guan Shan step gently into the backseat before shutting the door.

A murmured conversation passed between Xui Ying and the driver, too low for Guan Shan to hear. His head lolled back, a headache pricking him like a fallen stalactite between the eyes.

He’d never been in a car before.

‘This guy’ll get you home, brother.’

Guan Shan rolled his head to look through the window. ‘Xui Ying, you don’t even know—’

‘It’s taken care of.’ Xui Ying smiled, crouching down, elbows resting on the window. ‘Trust me.’

Guan Shan rubbed at his eyes, nausea rolling over him in waves. ‘The bill—the drinks—’

‘Don’t worry about it. The bill’s settled.’ He leaned in one last time, close enough for Guan Shan to hear him whisper over the building rumble of the car’s engine: ‘Mr He sends his regards.’

* * *

Jian Yi was at the house when Guan Shan returned, lights turned low, jazz music drifting from a record player in one of the rooms. A bouquet of fresh carnations sat on the side table in the hallway, sweetly fragrant and barely disguising the smell of wood polish and paint sitting underneath it. Guan Shan heard the quiet thudding of footsteps on the floorboards above him as he shut the door, pulling his shoes off. He slumped against it.

New York’s chaos didn’t end at night, which meant Guan Shan had enough time to angle his face towards the open panels of the automobile and suck in night air while the driver made his way to Jian Yi’s brownstone on Mott Street. Lights and music and obnoxious voices swarmed past him, Guan Shan an unsteady observer inside the confines of a machine. He’d had enough of being a participant that night; his resolve had left him.

The drive meant he had enough time, too, to replay the last few hours in his head on blurred repeat, memories of action and conversation soaked in foreign liquor, emotions bolstered by it.

_Mr He sends his regards._

So quickly had He Tian had gotten word spread to his contacts. So quickly had he handled things, like Guan Shan was something to be passed over and moved and taken care of. Even with the vodka soaking up his rationality, Guan Shan felt fear trickle through him, a ridged knife in his stomach that kept twisting the more he thought about it. What kind of power did He Tian have over this city and its people that Guan Shan had yet to see?

The irony of the night struck him: he’d refused He Tian’s cognac, and drank his bootleg liquor four blocks away. He Tian wouldn’t have poured it down his throat to loosen his resolve; Guan Shan would willingly, unknowingly, pour it down himself. He Tian was everywhere.

‘Guan Shan! You’re home!’

Guan Shan pushed himself away from the door as Jian Yi appeared at the top of the stairs, bounding down the steps two at a time. He was still in a suit, jacket abandoned somewhere and his waistcoat fully unbuttoned. His hair hung loosely around his face, strands shaped back in a way that was singular to the harried gesture of a hand dragged through again and again. His skin gleamed, eyes bright, but he was frayed at the edges. Guan Shan thought he looked tired.

‘Yeah, I’m back,’ he said. He couldn’t say home. Home was a strange concept that lay flat on his tongue; throwing it around like Jian Yi did was impossible.

Jian Yi hesitated in front of Guan Shan, as if he were waiting for something. Warm greetings weren’t easily at Guan Shan’s disposal. Now now—not after the whole night. Not with the vodka dissipating and the dryness in his mouth becoming more apparent.

Jian Yi cleared his throat. ‘Did you… have a good shift?’

He was skirting around the question he wanted to ask:  _Why are you back so late? Why do you smell like damp and moonshine and bile?_

‘It was fine,’ Guan Shan said, hands in his pockets.

‘Good!’ Jian Yi said brightly. ‘That’s good.’ He chuckled, nervous energy like a live wire. ‘Zhengxi really shouldn’t have kept you working so late.’

Guan Shan shook his head. His temples throbbed, and he regretted the movement. ‘It wasn’t him. I went to a bar with one of the other guys. Grey.’

‘You’re making friends?’ Jian Yi asked, his disposition twisting Guan Shan’s lies. Guan Shan couldn’t decide between guilt and irritation. He hadn’t agreed to daily interviews as payment for staying here.

‘You could say that.’ Guan Shan drew a hand over his face. ‘Look, Jian Yi, I—’

‘I know, I’m sorry. You look exhausted. Go get some sleep. I know you haven’t rested properly since you got here.’

Guan Shan eyed Jian Yi. He was too eager—too awake, an anticipation singing in his words, questioned unasked and unanswered, but Guan Shan’s headache was quickly catching up with him.

He nodded at Jian Yi, side-stepping him to move towards the staircase. ‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.

Jian Yi let him pass, but Guan Shan didn’t hear the sound of following footsteps. He didn’t hear anything. He reached the first step, right hand on the glossed wooden handrail, and paused.

Jian Yi grabbed the opportunity, rope running through his hands and threatening to strip his skin. ‘Was that a car outside? Dropping you here?’

‘You haven’t seen one before?’ Guan Shan said wryly, glancing over his shoulder.

‘I meant—did Zhengxi pay you already? For a cab?’

Guan Shan looked at Jian Yi. The same impression hit him as yesterday at the laundry, a youth that shouldn’t have been wrapped up in the suit he wore, or the huge house he lived in. Jian Yi looked small, standing in his own doorway with uncertainty, like stepping further into his own home was an act of trespassing.

‘Why don’t you ask what you really want to, Jian Yi?’

Jian Yi said, ‘I spoke with He Tian.’

‘He told me.’

Jian Yi had the decency to look vaguely embarrassed. ‘I meant after this evening.’

Guan Shan faltered. He swallowed, throat clicking dryly. ‘News travels really fucking fast around here, huh?’

‘When he’s concerned? Yeah.’

Guan Shan sighed. He turned and lowered himself onto the third step of the staircase, wood digging into his back, head put fleetingly in his hands.

‘You need to be careful, Guan Shan,’ said Jian Yi, voice suddenly quieter. He didn’t move from where he was standing, face moulded from shadows and tungsten lamps and the lights of Mott Street, seeping through the door’s stained glass like a kaleidoscope. He wasn’t the same person as he’d been a moment ago, and the shift was jarring.

‘I know.’ And then, ‘Why did you lie to me?’

Jian Yi looked at his feet. ‘I didn’t want you getting involved in that.’

‘So you got me a job that sits right on top of where he operates?’

Jian Yi winces. ‘I know how it sounds,’ he said. ‘But I’d be able to keep an eye on you there, with Zhengxi. At least you’d be safe.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘The tongs,’ Jian Yi said quietly. ‘You’re angry, right? They snatch up people like that in a heartbeat. And they don’t try and get rid of it. They just keep fuelling it. Throw more dry wood and more gasoline over it. They  _want_ you to be angry until you burn with it, and you burn their enemies with you too.’

_There’s a fire in you._

The voice echoing in Guan Shan’s head made him shudder, He Tian filling up every vacant space. His words on Jian Yi’s tongue was pervasive and painful; had he given the same line to Jian Yi once? Was that how he caught people? A compliment twinned with a threat.

‘That’s real fucking poetic,’ Guan Shan grumbled.

But he wondered—how openly did he carry it? Could Jian Yi feel the heat of it as he brushed past Guan Shan? Was it his hair, communist-red, and the way his words cut on every syllable like sipping on a cut glass and swallowing water in a blood-filled mouth?

Guan Shan picked at a splinter of wood on the banister. ‘You don’t know why I’m angry,’ he said.

‘I don’t,’ Jian Yi admitted. ‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘No.’

A resigned smile appeared on Jian Yi’s face. ‘Secrets are money around here. Watch that someone doesn’t come and steal it.’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he lied. ‘And I’ve got nothin’ left to lose.’

‘Why don’t I believe either of those statements?’

Guan Shan shrugged. ‘That’s on you. You’re giving me a place to stay and—I  _appreciate_ that. But that’s it. We don’t know each other. You don’t know me. You don’t owe me anything and you  _said_ I didn’t owe you.’

‘None of this is about that,’ Jian Yi said, fingering the pocket watch hanging from his waistcoat. ‘It’s about righteousness. About protecting each other from outsiders. While you’re under my roof, I’ve got that duty.’

‘That’s how you have the house, right?’ Guan Shan guessed, distaste seeping through his words. ‘You deal in favours. No one ever has to pay you back, but they know they should. So you get them to a position where they can.’

Jian Yi put his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. ‘If… that’s how you want to see it.’

Guan Shan rolled his eyes. ‘Please,’ he muttered under his breath.

‘Guan Shan—’ Jian Yi started, but he was cut off by a knock at the door, a rap of knuckles on the glass panel.

They both stilled, exchanged glances. It was well past midnight, fast approaching dawn. No one should’ve been at Jian Yi’s door this late—this early. The jazz music playing on the record filled the silence.

Dutifully, Jian Yi straightened himself, and fastened the middle button of his waistcoat. He dragged a hand through his wheat-blond hair, yellowish in the light of the hallway, and opened the door.

‘Hui Chen,’ Jian Yi said, coloured with surprise, shoulders collapsing from their stiff posture.

‘Message from Mr He, Mr Jian,’ came a high-pitched voice, small shadow spilling over the doorway.

Guan Shan rested his head against the banister, and past Jian Yi’s lean frame he caught sight of the same child who had appeared at Guo Wei’s laundry the day before, bedraggled and smudged with dirt.

Jian Yi took the offered note, palmed the boy a few dimes, and locked the door behind him.

Silence settled, dust motes swimming, Jian Yi rendered into static unreality.

‘So?’ Guan Shan prompted.

‘It’s for you,’ Jian Yi said, walking towards Guan Shan with the note extended between index and middle finger.

Cautiously, Guan Shan took it. Jian Yi lingered, but didn’t ask. His eyes were shadowed.

Guan Shan unfolded the note, ignored how his name looked on the front of it. The paper was a rich cream vellum, faintly redolent of tobacco leaves and amber liquor, the writing scrawled in the blank ink of a fountain pen, sharp points and severe lines.

‘So?’ Jian Yi said, a wavering, teasing echo.

Guan Shan balled the paper up between his fist. The record player seemed louder, a woman’s sultry voice taunting.

‘My first job,’ he said, craning his neck back, staring up at the ceiling, dizzy. ‘He wants me to be his secretary.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or reblogging [the fic on Tumblr!](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/174991369976/fic-nothings-gonna-hurt-you-baby-26)


	3. patriotism

He Tian was sitting at the dining table when Guan Shan walked downstairs the next morning, his mouth dry and ashen from the liquor last night.

His pressed suit and concentrated gaze gave him the air of someone who’d been awake hours, and Guan Shan grew self-conscious in the teal silk nightshirt and trousers Jian Yi had given him, hair ruffled from sleep, sheet lines on his skin, eyes wandering blearily—sharp and alert as soon as he saw the man eating breakfast in Jian Yi’s dining room.

‘Good morning,’ He Tian said, blowing the heat from a spoonful of broth.

Guan Shan stood immobile in the doorway. ‘Why are you here?’

He Tian tutted. ‘Impolite,’ he said, and swallowed a mouthful.

Cigarette smoke mixed with salted soup, steamed buns, hot rice, and the tang of newly cut fruit, and Guan Shan’s stomach twisted with hunger. He’d spent too long snooping Jian Yi’s house the day before to use his kitchen, and his dinner at Zhengxi’s had been small and hurried between shifts. The last full meal had been in his mother’s kitchen, congee and fried tofu with greens and braised beef, swallowed down with his mother’s worry lines and the hand she wouldn’t stop holding.

He Tian said, ‘Did you forget? I said the attorney would be here with a contract.’

Guan Shan narrowed his eyes. ‘Yeah. I’m only lookin’ at you.’

He Tian smiled, all teeth. ‘Then you’re looking at my attorney. I don’t trust anyone else to carry out business I can do myself.’ He flicked his fingers across the table. ‘Sit. Eat. Jian Yi’s gone out, and you look wasting.’

The smell of food pulled him to the seat across the table, and Guan Shan cautiously picked up the sheaf of papers that rested beside the laid-out crockery. Stark paragraphs stared up at him, some terms Guan Shan knew and understood, and most he didn’t. He glanced up at He Tian, who was spearing a piece of melon with a fork.

‘What’s this?’ Guan Shan said.

‘What does it look like?’ He Tian said, chewing, helping himself to rice. ‘Your contract.’

The paper crinkled as Guan Shan’s fist closed around it. ‘I can’t understand this shit.’

He Tian said, ‘I know,’ and leaned back in the dining chair, as at home as if the house were his. Maybe it was. ‘It’s a farce,’ He Tian continued. ‘Just as you being my  _secretary_ will be a farce. Half of this is make-believe.’

‘You never asked if I could read or write.’

He Tian nodded. ‘Right.’ His head tilted. ‘Can you?’

‘Well enough,’ Guan Shan says sourly. He’d been educated in his village, taught to write mostly by his father from menus and pamphlets and newspapers. His mother would tell him stories as she worked in the house, Guan Shan acting as scribe, following her from room to room with a notebook and pencil. School had been too far from his village in Canton, and he’d never had the smarts or dedication to try for a university. There wasn’t much for his family to be prideful over.

‘I’ll take it,’ He Tian said. ‘Wouldn’t matter if you couldn’t. Eat.’

Guan Shan pushed down the desire to snap back at the command. Hunger won out, and he helped himself to broth and steam buns, peeled lychee and halved, sour-sweet pomelo.

He Tian watched him while he ate, tapped ash out into a cigarette tray, kept his gaze steady through the smoked haze, a lazed insouciance that left Guan Shan tense and nervous. He felt spiked with adrenaline, flashes of heat stabbing at the back of his neck and his thighs, and was grateful for the cracked-open window that let in New York’s cooling, damp autumn air, the chaotic acoustics of the city breaking stale silence.

One thing was abundantly clear to Guan Shan as he ate: dining with the enemy was as good as being in bed with them.

‘You’ve got better things to do than this,’ Guan Shan said eventually, sucking pomelo juice from his thumb, a thin sheen of spit layering his skin.

‘On the contrary,’ He Tian said, eyes on his. ‘I’ve got all day to do this if I choose.’

‘Must be real fucking nice,’ Guan Shan said. ‘That luxury.’

He Tian said, ‘On the contrary.’ He nodded to Guan Shan’s empty bowls, the abandoned fruit peel. ‘Go wash, if you’re finished. I have business I need your assistance with.’

‘Thought you could do this all day,’ Guan Shan said.

‘Thought you wanted a job,’ He Tian countered, smile polite enough to carry a threat.

Guan Shan left to shower.

* * *

He Tian drove them north-west through Manhattan in a black car called a Silver Ghost, which, as He Tian informed Guan Shan, was hand-built and one of only seven-thousand made in the world. Guan Shan told him he wasn’t much impressed by cars, sheltered beneath its collapsible fabric hood, eyeing the miniature winged woman made of silver that rose from the bonnet.

‘They’re an acquired taste,’ said He Tian, easing his way through the streets of Manhattan, away from Chinatown’s lower east side, where the bold, modernist buildings of Fifth Avenue and Greenwich Village and West Village rose higher, stretched wider, balconies bursting with flowers and a richness that was foreign and remote and western to Guan Shan, and billboards for cigarettes and Dodge and Ford motors clung to the building sides.

Jian Yi’s townhouse was a bungalow compared to some of the residences that filled the avenues of New York City’s Chelsea, Zhengxi’s restaurant a pale imitator of the glamour that lined the city streets up-town in Madison Square.

_An acquired taste._

‘Yeah,’ Guan Shan muttered distractedly. ‘Acquired by people with money.’

He Tian shrugged. ‘Or people with determination,’ he said. ‘With fire.’ His glance towards Guan Shan was pointed, but his eyes didn’t stray from the streets long, pedestrians lining the pavements, decked in raincoats and hoisting umbrellas like rifles over their shoulders. The clouds were a rolling purple, eagerly gathering, and Guan Shan felt the air wait for its rainstorm.

‘Fire doesn’t do anyone much good here if they’re not white.’

He Tian said, ‘That’s what they’d like you to believe.’

Guan Shan went sullen as He Tian pulled the car to a stop. They were on a residential street on the outskirts of Chelsea. Guan Shan could see glimpses of the Hudson River through wide-spaced brownstones, the pier not too far in the distance, choked with ships and docked boats, and fumes from tobacco factories and steel mills soaked the air.

He helped He Tian pull a fitted tarpaulin over the Silver Phantom, and followed him up the few steps to the doorway of one of the residences. The door unlocked with He Tian’s palmed key, and the unremarkable exterior shifted as soon as it closed behind them.

He Tian’s penchant for disguises was becoming distinctly apparent to Guan Shan as he took in the space; normalcy on the outside, a dizzying parade on the inside, where men in suits and women in slim dresses hurried about the building like bees in a hive, spurred on by the smoke of cigarettes and hash, the ground floor open and absent of dividing rooms, like the stretched innards of a warehouse.

If there was music playing, Guan Shan couldn’t hear it over the shouting of back-and-forth voices, of wooden doors slamming and typewriter carriages pealing to a next line, of feet stomping up staircases and floorboards creaking with traffic above. Glasses of liquor and cordial sat like permanent fixtures on the rows of desks that filled the room, green desk lamps like pockets of jade that fit the main hall of the lower floor, and wooden boards stood sentry-like along the walls. They were decorated with profile photographs and typewritten posters stuck with drawing pins like some policing precinct, but there was nothing abiding in the building.

Almost, it had the illusion of a bank: high windows and suited employees and the nervous, commercial energy of professionalism. But it was too obviously apart from that legality. Guan Shan could almost smell the cordite from gunfire, could taste the white buzz of bloodshot eyes and cocaine breath, could feel the red-soaked paper of stolen hundred-dollar notes.

Men and women paused as He Tian pushed through the hall, nodding and letting him pass, glancing up from typewriters and thick stacks of documentation. Someone took his coat, another the key to the car. A stout woman muttered hurried sentences in He Tian’s ear as he nodded and moved ceaselessly towards the staircase, Guan Shan following, upwards and through another identical hall-like room packed with people, and then towards the closed door at the room. The power He Tian held in this building was palpable, energy shifting from harried to focussed as soon as they caught sight of his dark suit and the golden hilt of his cane, which clacked pointedly along the floorboards.

Most alarming to Guan Shan was that no one stopped him; no one questioned him or raised eyebrows at his red hair. He had arrived with He Tian, and that gave him an authority—an immunity—that was frightening.

Guan Shan had no idea who he was dealing with.

Like the bar beneath Zhengxi’s restaurant, the office at the back of the room was solitary and polished, and the sound of the rooms outside was muted as soon as Guan Shan and He Tian were inside, a blanket of cotton wool draped over them.

Guan Shan sat himself down before He Tian’s desk, its owner standing with his shoulder blades hunched back as he poured over an open manilla folder bursting with sheets of paper.

‘The bar under the restaurant isn’t where you work,’ Guan Shan said, running sweaty palms over the fabric of his trousers.

‘Correct,’ He Tian said, flipping through sheets, eyes scanning black and white text with a rabid kind of pace. ‘Farces, remember?’

Guan Shan remembered—substituted  _farce_ for  _disguise_ in his head.

‘What do you do here?’ he asked. ‘What were all those people doin’?’

‘This and that,’ He Tian replied.

Guan Shan bit the side of his cheek. ‘And d’you want me to do  _this_ or  _that_?’

He Tian’s roaming gaze stilled, and with a careful steadiness, he looked up at Guan Shan. ‘What do you think, Guan Shan? What do you think someone like me  _does_?’

‘Isn’t that why I’m fuckin’ asking?’

He Tian’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, but then he collapsed into his desk chair with a cultured ease that seemed planned. He rubbed at his temple with the fingertips of his left hand. With his right, he dug into his desk drawers and threw a box of Turkish Murad cigarettes on the the surface, plucked one out, and lit it with the lighter in his breast pocket.

‘We run betting transactions here, Guan Shan. We handle liquor and opium imports. We ordain the gentlemen’s clubs and the whorehouses and fund the churches. We work with those  _dirty cop friends_  you happily condemned.’ He said, ‘We run the city here, Guan Shan.’

Guan Shan remembered the conversation he’d heard last night in the little Chinatown watering hole.

‘You’re a Tong.’

He Tian didn’t blink. ‘That’s a part of it. But that’s China. I’m talking New York.’ He took a drag. ‘Do you know two of the oaths a man takes to join a Tong?’

Guan Shan didn’t.

‘Loyalty, and righteousness,’ He Tian said, holding up forefinger and thumb. ‘Loyalty to one’s people, and a promise to protect those people from outsiders.’ He Tian spread his hands. ‘How’s that going to work in our people’s favour if we shut ourselves off from those outsiders—whose land we  _live_ on and  _work_ on and  _shit_ on?’

It was barely nine o’clock, but Guan Shan thought about the drink He Tian had offered him last night, and he thought he might accept it now.

‘You want our people to—assimilate?’ Guan Shan asked, trying to think of the word. It tasted dirty on his tongue like poorly made cigars and the ash of burnt ginger left too long over a flame.

‘In their eyes, we’re all delinquents. Thieving foreigners. We’re disorganised and lawless and we all want to follow different rules according to our heritage. How can we work with other people if we can’t work with ourselves?  _Then_ there’s the Russians, the Italians, the Irish. I want a common goal.’

Guan Shan stared at He Tian. ‘So you want Chinatown to be under your rule? Everyone according to your rules?’

He Tian arched a brow, and tapped his cigarette. ‘Is it not already?’

‘I heard there were wars.’  _You can’t rule something when there’s civil war._

‘Old wars led by old people. I don’t belong to that.’

Guan Shan swallowed this. ‘You think—You  _know_ you have Chinatown,’ he said, quickly correcting himself. ‘So, what, you’re going for the whole of fucking Manhattan?’

He Tian smiled thinly. ‘Guan Shan. I’m going for the East Coast.’

Something ran down Guan Shan’s spine like a spider, spreading coldness through every web of muscle and capillary and bone fragment. He looked at He Tian, nine o’clock in the morning and running half of New York’s underground, and knew that He Tian believed in everything he was saying.

What scared Guan Shan, scared him in its arrogance, was that he believed in everything He Tian was saying too.

A thought popped into his head easily, unbidden, and it chilled him:  _How long do you have to run with this dream before they put you down?_  He Tian’s death seemed like the death of a god, something invincible and winged and too-powerful brought down by the humanness of a bullet or a knife. But Guan Shan knew that men were only men, and as much as he feared He Tian—fuck him and his mortal weaknesses—He Tian was only the same.

‘You’re fucking crazy,’ Guan Shan said.

He Tian chuckled. ‘My brother would be happy to hear that.’

‘Your brother?’

‘He runs the West,’ He Tian explained, a dismissive edge to his tone. ‘He always called the East an  _untamable beast._ It’d be a fucking  _pleasure_ to prove him wrong.’

_He runs the West._

Fuck, Guan Shan was beyond this.

If He Tian had his hand in every pocket of every citizen in a thousand-mile radius, Guan Shan was a pauper with empty pockets drinking rainwater off the streets. He couldn’t do this. His father was lost to the untamable beast that Guan Shan thought was He Tian before it was the coastline, and Guan Shan was  _dreaming_ if he thought he’d ever find his father again. He was going to die here.

‘And where do I fit in all this?’ he asked, fighting to keep his voice steady. ‘You saw me in a restaurant and took me as I was? No money and shitty education and a background you don’t really believe? You don’t seem like the kinda person who makes those kinda mistakes.’

‘Right,’ said He Tian. ‘So if I wanted you, what makes you think I’ve made a mistake?’

‘If you—’ The words shuddered to a stop. ‘Want me for  _what_?’

He Tian shrugged. ‘Company. A second opinion. You interest me.’ He pressed out his cigarette. ‘You ask a fuck ton of questions for someone who just wants money, Mo Guan Shan.’

His full name on He Tian’s tongue was fearful; did He Tian remember Guan Shan’s father’s name? Had he made the connection? Was Guan Shan sitting here, waiting for a moment to strike, and all the while He Tian was waiting for him to do the same with some omniscient arrogance?

‘I don’t trust this,’ Guan Shan told him.

He Tian said, ‘That makes two of us, and I don’t care. You knew my name, where I was. What made you think you could?’ He held up a hand, fingers slender and exposed and silencing. ‘No more questions,’ he said, and tapped a finger on the desk. ‘Business.’

He threw the folder in front of him over to Guan Shan’s side of the desk, and Guan Shan picked it up the same way he approached anything offered to him by He Tian: tentative and cautious and waiting for it to bite. The same way he approached the man himself.

‘What d’you want with this guy?’ Guan Shan asked, leafing through the documented profile of some white politician, a black-and-white photo of the man staring up, his smile a stretch of white teeth that made Guan Shan’s skin crawl, light eyes leering and imposing through the paper.

‘We’re going to pay him a visit,’ He Tian said. ‘Mr Sauer’s parents fled to America in the eighteen-fifties after their pro-democracy politics threw them into government scrutiny. Sauer seems to be a fan of twisting his family’s beliefs to suit his own agenda.’

Guan Shan looked up, mouth twisting. ‘But you want to twist our country’s for your agenda? Fucking hypocrite.’

Wordlessly, immediately, He Tian leaned over and pressed his cigarette into the back of Guan Shan’s hand.

The searing burn was immediate, brief and gone within the second, but it was enough for Guan Shan to cry out and drop the folder into his lap, eyes watering with stinging, welting pain, the smell of burnt skin filling his nostrils.

‘You were saying?’ He Tian said, and relit the cigarette.

Guan Shan cradled his hand against his chest as his body trembled—and glared.

‘Don’t cross me, Guan Shan. Neither of us will like it.’ He reached over again, ignoring Guan Shan’s flinch, and grabbed the folder from Guan Shan’s lap. ‘I have most of Tammany, but I want more than that political machine. I need the right-wingers too if I’m getting this Exclusion Act out of my way.’

Mind reeling from the sudden act of violence, Guan Shan tried to piece himself back together and focus on the conversation. His skin had stopped searing, but it was sore and needed ice, the flesh already risen in a bubble the shape of a cigarette cherry. For some time, Guan Shan knew there would be a scar.

‘Sauer’s my answer to this problem,’ He Tian continued, ‘but if he won’t convert then he needs to get out of my way.’

‘Convert?’ Guan Shan asked, clearing his horse voice.

‘He’s an opioid addict, which is easy leverage. But he’s roughed up some of my girls a few times too many.’ He Tian ran a thumb along his jawline in thoughtful planning. ‘I’m half-hoping he won’t be easy to bait.’

‘It would justify you murdering him.’

He Tian’s smile is cold. ‘When one of my girls ends up in the hospital with her breasts cut open with a knife, we can talk about  _justification_.’

Guan Shan felt his face twist at the starkness of He Tian’s words, undressed and barren. He spoke with a vulgar clarity that clashed with the low smoothness of his voice, an impression that was jarring and left Guan Shan feeling off-kilter. Really, he hadn’t felt balanced since the moment he’d set foot in New York, and He Tian’s character was threatening to throw him over.

‘Why bother with this Sauer guy at all?’ he asked. ‘If he’s such a piece of shit, why try and get him on your side? There’s other guys in government you could bait, right?’

Guan Shan couldn’t think about how easy the words were rolling off his tongue; how easy a concept belonging to He Tian’s world had suddenly become a standard part of his own.

He Tian nodded at him. ‘Many others, but this one’s already in someone else’s pocket, which means he must be worth something to the rest of the righters.’ His tone changed, went careful in a way Guan Shan hadn’t heard before, like he was testing waters. ‘You’ve heard of She Li?’

The name was unfamiliar. ‘Should I have?’

He Tian frowned and became pensive. Guan Shan couldn’t figure out what was puzzling him.

‘She Li wants his own Tong, and he wants to be sheriff.’

‘You’re worried about this guy?’

‘No. But I want to know what he’s selling people like Sauer that makes them want him more than me.’ He looked somewhere above Guan Shan’s head, seeing something Guan Shan couldn’t, eyes unfocused. ‘We’ve tapped his phones and cut through his telegrams, but there’s been nothing. None of my guys know anything, and if they did, I’d know. Whatever he’s doing, he’s hiding it really fucking well.’

‘What if it’s just the same as you? Buying Sauer with heroin and prostitutes?’

‘We’ve found his supplier and tracked it back,’ He Tian said. ‘It’s some big-timer from Chicago my brother knows, not She Li.’

‘And what if She Li’s giving him more than that? More than what he wants?’

He Tian shifted, looking at him blankly. ‘What’s your point?’

‘This—this Sauer fucker. He’s government, right? So what if She Li’s giving the  _government_ somethin’. Sauer’s just the in-between, and She Li’s not really giving Sauer  _anything._ ’

‘If that’s the case, then Sauer can be compromised. His duty to himself is more important than his patriotism.’

Guan Shan shrugged. ‘Guess you’ll have to meet the guy and find out.’

‘Guess I will,’ said He Tian. ‘And you’ll come with me.’ He rested a weighted gaze on Guan Shan, flipping his lighter in his hand. Guan Shan was growing used to the man’s stillness, his intense silences and dark staring. It made every motion, every rotation of the metal, captivating. ‘You know, you make everything sound easy,’ He Tian said quietly. ‘Simple.’

Guan Shan didn’t know what to make of that. Guan Shan made everything sound easy out of brutal honesty; He Tian was enigmatic and mercurial, except when he was cruel. It made him difficult to grasp, meant his mind must work on overtime, trying to make more sense of things than was needed.

A knock on the door interrupted their strange silence.

The senior woman who’d been muttering in He Tian’s ear when they arrived at the office poked her around the corner.

‘Your brother’s on the wire, sir.’

He Tian looked up, a clouded expression on his face. ‘It’s barely dawn there,’ he muttered to no one in particular, and then, resigned: ‘Give me a moment, Mei Fen.’

Mei Fen nodded, retreated. The door shut behind her, and He Tian had a finger pointed in Guan Shan’s direction as he stood.

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave after I’m done.’ As he passed, he leaned down into Guan Shan’s ear, his voice kept to a murmur as if someone would hear him—as if it mattered who heard his threat. His breath was hot on Guan Shan’s neck, and Guan Shan caught a glimpse of He Tian’s leather shoulder holster, gun pressing forward on his jacket. ‘I’ll know if you try anything,’ he murmured, close as a lover, ‘and I will do worse than your hand.’

With He Tian gone, the pain from the burn Guan Shan had briefly forgotten now flared with a steady, stinging throb. He clenched his fist, unclenched it, skin shifting over his bones, the blistered flesh crying out with the movement, like pressing at a bruise, or twisting a loose tooth.

There wasn’t much of  _anything_ Guan Shan would be able to do while He Tian answered the call, but it didn’t stop him from wandering the perimeter of He Tian’s office barely seconds after the door closed.

Bottles of whisky and  _baiju_ and gin filled almost every cabinet, and cigar trays that He Tian didn’t seem to smoke were stacked in neat rows like the unread books. Boxes of documented reports filled the higher cabinets, sheets of paper that Guan Shan flipped through quickly, the listed figures a blur that Guan Shan couldn’t make sense of. Dates and names and locations were crammed into most of the reports, and Guan Shan skimmed them knowing he had no idea what he was looking for.

The drawers of He Tian’s desk were mostly locked, and there was no release switch that Guan Shan could find, fingers running over the smooth underside of the desk. Two pistols and a revolver sat neatly in one of the drawers, beside a box of gilded fountain pens and bottles of dark ink, and a serrated knife lay on a sheaf of starched vellum paper—the same He Tian had used to deliver the message last night.

 _I just need something,_ Guan Shan thought desperately, casting hasty glances at the closed door.  _Something that makes him culpable. Something that connects him._

But there wasn’t—locked cabinets and drawers barred him, and what was available to him—liquor bottles and expensive stationery and guns—gave him nothing. It told Guan Shan everything he already knew: that He Tian was rich, cultured, lawless, and violent. That, if he’d orchestrated his father’s arrival into New York, he wouldn’t leave a trail.

Guan Shan was thinking about the contract He Tian had given him that morning, head bowed over the open drawers of He Tian’s desk, when the door opened.

Guan Shan froze.

They stared at each other in silence, and He Tian shut the door without turning away.

He Tian stared at him. ‘Find what you’re looking for?’ he asked.

Guan Shan glanced down at the revolvers in the drawer, weighing, fuelled by the kind of chaotic, mad impulse his mother would warn him to watch. He’d never fired a gun in his life—didn’t know if they were even loaded. Carefully, Guan Shan pushed the drawer closed, no screeching of unoiled wood, just a smooth insertion, which He Tian watched from the doorway.

His watchful stillness could have told Guan Shan one of four things: none of the guns were loaded; He Tian knew he could pull a gun on Guan Shan faster than Guan Shan could on him; he didn’t believe Guan Shan would be capable of pulling the trigger; or he wasn’t afraid of death.

He would suffer a mortal wound with a smile on his face, and the knowledge that once a gunshot reverberated through the offices, Guan Shan would be dead within minutes.

‘No,’ Guan Shan told him, throat dry. His heart ached in his chest as it crashed against his ribcage. Maybe he’d be shot anyway, the cigarette burn on the back of his hand like a papercut. ‘I didn’t.’

_You stupid fuck._

He Tian nodded, as if understanding. ‘Alright,’ he said, and Guan Shan waited for that quick strike of violence He Tian had employed in the office just before—a knife at his head, a pistol aimed at a kneecap.

But there was nothing.

 _He’s unpredictable,_ Guan Shan reminded himself.  _He’ll swipe one time and hunt for three days the next._

The thought did nothing to comfort him, made him only understand that if He Tian exacted no punishment now, then it would come later, when Guan Shan’s guard was down.

He Tian’s coat was draped over his arm, ready to go and find Sauer, and Guan Shan knew that He Tian was going to leave this office with him—or alone.

‘Grab one of those, would you?’ He Tian said, jerking his head towards the desk.‘The Korovin would do. The blue one with the wooden side panels. Watch the blowback.’

It took a second for Guan Shan to catch up. ‘You want me to give you a fucking  _gun_.’

He Tian smiled, propped himself against the doorframe. ‘I want  _you_ to give  _you_ a gun. I already have mine.’

Guan Shan had already called He Tian crazy. He was already bewildered by the man’s operations. Guan Shan had nothing to do but gape.

‘Something wrong?’ He Tian asked.

‘No,’ Guan Shan said. And then, as if experiencing some great, philosophical epiphany, ‘You don’t make mistakes.’

He Tian’s smile widened. ‘You’re learning, Guan Shan.’

* * *

One of He Tian’s men had been watching Sauer for weeks, trailing him from city hall to grocery store to whorehouse; it made finding his hotel suite at The Pierre easy, dressed in Turkish marble and Indian silks and overlooking the lazed movements of Central Park below, appropriately lavish for the bottles of champagne that rolled across Sauer’s marbled flooring and any sultan or rajah or English lady who wandered into the hotel’s ballroom or tea gardens or glistening lobby.

He Tian sat with his legs crossed in the alcove of an ornate window seat smoking a cigarette, while Sauer hurried to find his underpants and the two French women in his bed found a new residence in the bathroom and locked the door behind them.

Guan Shan stood at the suite’s front door, two of He Tian’s men standing watch in the hallway, and watched the scene play out before him, uncomfortably aware of the gun in his pocket. He Tian had given him a brief lesson on the drive uptown, his instructions matter-of-fact and trained, like teaching Guan Shan how to light a cigarette.

Guan Shan knew how to fight; he knew how to throw a punch. He’d bitten his lip enough times and broken enough teeth against his split knuckles to handle that—righteous kids from his village and thieves on the freight trains—but this was different. There was a detachment in pulling a trigger and ending someone with the sudden finality of a gunshot. It wouldn’t  _hurt_ Guan Shan to pull it. He wouldn’t risk bleeding.

‘You won’t even need to use it,’ He Tian told him, palming the keys of his car to a chauffeur with a five-dollar bill.

‘ _That’s_ a fucking comfort,’ Guan Shan had muttered in response, and followed He Tian, smirking, into the hotel.

Sauer was bigger than Guan Shan had thought from the photo, closer to He Tian’s height and broad in the shoulders, thick with muscle, but older too. His stomach was softening and the blond line of his hair was fading backwards, the leery glittering eyes in the photo He Tian’d kept now dull and watery. Guan Shan noted his sluggish movements and laboured breath, his light-haired moustache beaded with sweat. In part, Guan Shan could chalk it up to the champagne, to the sex, to He Tian’s casual entry— _tell the girls to get the fuck out and get dressed_ —into his hotel suite. In part, Guan Shan recognised the signs of an addict.

Eventually, Sauer was clothed, shirt tails hanging untucked over the waistline of his trousers, his feet bare. He stood with a hand tight around the bronze rail of the suite bar, darting glances back at Guan Shan every so often, aware that he was sandwiched between the two men, window and door and bathroom barred, and drank deeply, shakily, from a glass of some clear liquid.

He Tian kicked his long legs out in front of him, and got to his feet.

‘Sauer,’ he said, finding the appropriate time for his introduction. ‘ _Mein Name ist He Tian._ ’

Sauer’s pallid complexion went translucent.

German, Guan Shan knew less than English, so the conversation that followed was a blur of guttural consonants and cutting exchanges that left Sauer stuttering and red-faced, and He Tian wearing a cool look of impassivity.

The sharper, more stressed Sauer’s responses grew, the lower He Tian’s voice dropped, the bass of each syllable rattling the base of Guan Shan’s throat. This was an interrogation of a hostage, and Guan Shan found himself shifting in discomfort with each question He Tian demanded, the gun growing heavier in his pocket with every panicked response Sauer threw out, arms flailing in defence of accusation. Questions were thrown back and forth, answers blunt and snappish, and Guan Shan only knew He Tian was getting nowhere.

He Tian never moved forward, didn’t shift his weight or make use of the cane in his right hand, a placid lake looked upon at night, movement mistaken for the shimmer of moonlight—so it must have been Sauer who moved first.

His glass smashed to the floor, shrill screaming echoed from the bathroom, and his nose was burst and bloodied before Guan Shan could make sense of any motion.

He stood frozen at the door to the suite as He Tian struck a fist into Sauer’s solar plexus, winding him and feigning to the right to miss Sauer’s strangled swing, and Guan Shan’s hands ached for a fight.

‘Don’t get involved,’ He Tian had told him. ‘Whatever happens.’

Guan Shan resented him for giving orders that were so hard to follow.

Sauer threw slow, heavy-handed punches like a boxer, glass crunching under his feet, his breath panting and shuddered. He managed to catch a fistful of He Tian’s jacket, the momentum causing them to stumble on unsteady feet towards the bar, and He Tian’s head caught on bottles as Sauer dragged him across its surface, hand scrabbling for a shard of broken glass to cut He Tian with.

He never found one, advantage not lasting long; He Tian brought a knee up between Sauer’s spread legs and the German was forced to release his hold on He Tian’s jacket, staggering backwards on impulse.

Guan Shan’s eyes widened as He Tian straightened himself. Blood from Sauer’s nose was soaking his white shirt, and more ran from a glass-made gouge in He Tian’s temple and down to his jaw line, which he wiped away with an impetuous swipe.

His movements towards Sauer were predatory, stalking, each click of his heels thudding with Guan Shan’s racing heartbeat, and he felt himself flinch as He Tian’s cane rose like an arm ready to throw a javelin—and swung.

The cane cracked across Sauer’s face, his shrill cry reverberating as he clutched at his collapsed jaw, and he collapsed backwards onto the marble floor with a thud.

Another swing caught Sauer’s raised hand across the knuckles, and Guan Shan swallowed at the nausea that was rolling in his stomach as the bones of Sauer’s fingers snapped.

He Tian wasn’t smiling as he stood over the man, showed no outward sign of pleasure at the slaughter, and Guan Shan didn’t know if that was better or worse—that he could do this, break a man, with such cold efficiency and feel nothing.

‘He Tian,’ he said quietly. ‘I think he gets the message.’

It would take weeks for Sauer’s jaw to work again, for a string of words to come out that didn’t make his eyes water, longer for him to be able to hold a pen or a gun or his cock. He Tian needed him damaged and warned and out-of-action.  _This_ wasn’t a necessity.

He Tian’s dark look could only be received as a glare. ‘I wasn’t here to threaten, Guan Shan,’ he said. ‘You knew that.’

Guan Shan knew. Convert or get out of He Tian’s way. Justifiable murder.

‘You could use him,’ Guan Shan said. ‘Use him as a mole.’

Sauer was left groaning on the floor while He Tian stalked towards the bar, found an unharmed bottle of gin swimming with dark berries, and took a swig. His chest rose even and strong, and his fingers tightened and untightened around the handle of his cane as he wiped his mouth into the arm of his jacket, spat blood on the floor, lit up a cigarette. Ineffective from where he stood in the doorway, Guan Shan caught a glimpse of He Tian’s split knuckles.

‘A mole,’ He Tian said bitterly. ‘He’s useless to me. Denies knowing anything about She Li. Either he’s telling the truth or She Li’s got him hooked tighter than I thought, and I don’t have the time to break him.’

Guan Shan glanced at Sauer, moaning over the warped shape of his right hand, clutching it to his chest.

‘You offered him opium?’

He Tian threw a disgusted look at the politician. ‘Offered him the fucking moon.’

He stubbed his cigarette out onto the bar and stretched his hands across his surface. Strands of slick-backed hair draped in front of his eyes like thin shadows. He was still standing, barely wounded, but he wore the heavy air of someone who’d suffered a defeat.

‘He’s the third one,’ He Tian admitted. And then, ‘Who knew these fuckers’ prejudices ran this deep.’

It felt strange to be having a conversation while a man agonised on the floor between them, but then maybe He Tian was right: all of this was about the Exclusion Acts. The Irish and the Russians and the Italians—where were the acts being placed against them? Where were their alliances for the Chinese when America had been birthed from foreigners and built on the back of its brown-skinned natives?

If the right-wing politicians wouldn’t budge while people back in Guan Shan’s village and neighbouring towns risked starvation and poverty weekly, risked travelling thousands of miles to feed their families, maybe this was the answer.

This rushed through his head in a few seconds, some burst of moral outrage that Guan Shan didn’t know what to do with—and then movement caught his eye.

He didn’t know where Sauer had gotten it from, how either He Tian or Guan Shan had missed the palm-sized pistol now held in Sauer’s left hand, but Guan Shan’s body burst into a cold-hot flame that was singular to fate-driven moments like these.

The gun was pointed at He Tian’s back.

Like the jerky, fast-paced movements of a movie star, there was a blurred sequence of events that Guan Shan would only recollect in agonising slowness later: Sauer lifting himself up from the floor with a strained groan, He Tian turning in response to Guan Shan’s silence, Guan Shan taking a step forward that seemed to take a lifetime, like trying to run from a monster in a nightmare, hand moving to the inside of his jacket, wondering who was the monster? Who was the victim? Who would get their throat torn out and their blood worn like a mask and—

 _Bang_.

* * *

Guan Shan never knew how loud it would be, eardrums fractured from the sound so close and confined in a room made of marble and crystal and silk. He didn’t know how it would suck out everything until he was left with something deeper than silence, a vacuum emptiness that made his ears ring with shallow dissonance, how movement would blur and stumble in his vision, reason abandoning him.

But he learnt quickly.

He caught up with himself on the drive to Zhengxi’s, He Tian’s men leaning over their boss’ body with heavy-handed presses on his shoulder in the back of the car, He Tian’s face moon-white and sheened with sweat, brows drawn and lip curling in pain and irritation.

Sauer’s face swam in Guan Shan’s head as the driver took sharp turns that made He Tian groan, narrowly missing carriages and cyclists and other cars.

The German had worn a quiet look of surprise before he died.  _Oh,_ it said, red stain spilling across his back like the mistake of a clumsy waiter, pistol clattering to the tiles, head hitting the marble with a dull thud declaring lifelessness.

The hired girls screamed in the bathroom after the gunshot, and soon the suite doors had burst open, He Tian’s men cramming themselves into the room, piecing together the events—Sauer dead, He Tian wounded, Guan Shan holding a gun—in a belligerent rush.

‘He’s with me,’ He Tian had gritted out as they turned on Guan Shan, hunched over and clutching at his shoulder by the bar, and then it was a rush down the hotel’s back staircase, feet stomping against the metal, He Tian almost carried down the stairs, and into the car waiting among kitchen fumes and trash bags.

They were in Chinatown when Guan Shan refocused his eyes again. Zhengxi was already waiting outside the restaurant, which remained closed until the evening, and He Tian’s men were helping their boss to stagger inside before the car’s engine had even been cut.

There was a padded table laid out in front of Zhengxi’s desk that trembled as He Tian was lifted onto it, and beside it sat a metal tray of instruments and a bowl of water and rolls of bandages on what looked like a liquor cart.

‘No questions, just fix me up?’ Zhengxi asked impassively, already cutting away at He Tian’s clothing with a pair of scissors, his swift, steady actions and words like an echo of a previous time. Previous times.

‘I knew I’d hired you for a reason,’ He Tian managed to reply, humour ashen, drinking from a supplied bottle of vodka.

Zhengxi snorted. ‘Jian Yi hired me. Not you.’

He Tian tried to rise up onto his elbows. ‘And who hired Jian Yi?’

Zhengxi shoved He Tian back onto the table, unleashing a string of colourful curses from He Tian’s mouth, and peered pragmatically at He Tian’s bullet wound with a magnifying glass. He didn’t look at Guan Shan, but Guan Shan knew Zhengxi had seen him when they entered, marking Guan Shan’s presence with a soft frown that said,  _It didn’t take you long._

‘How close was it?’ Zhenxgi asked, picking up the necessary tools for extraction. He squinted. ‘At least it hasn’t fragmented.’

His remarks left He Tian lolling his head on the bench until his eyes met Guan Shan’s, who was standing before the closed office door, conscious of the weight of his limbs, the dryness of his throat, how quiet he felt—removed, and numb, stuck inside a goldfish bowl where the outside was misshapen and muted, head knocking dully against the glass, the skin of his hand still vibrating.

_It hadn’t even hurt._

When Guan Shan blinked, he realised He Tian’s eyes weren’t glassy with pain, with the hazy clouding of the wounded, but startlingly clear, like pain was a crystalliser. It made him less murky, and Guan Shan could see the scars that littered his chest, some the neat lines of a knife swipe, others deep gouges that dimpled his torso, well-muscled and sweat-soaked, the mawling spread of a panther tattoo twisting across his skin, tail disappearing below his navel.

‘You saved my life,’ He Tian said, the last word marked with a wince while Zhengxi doused the wound and filled the office with the smell of ethanol.

Guan Shan had no honest answer. He could only think,  _I saved your life, and I don’t know why._ Part of him argued that it was for his father, because if He Tian died then Guan Shan’s father died with him. But another part of him was clouded and voiceless, and Guan Shan had no reason to want to save the life of a man like him, whom he’d known barely a day. No reason at all.

‘Patriotism. Sauer was gonna kill you,’ was all he offered.  _You told me I wouldn’t need it._

He Tian sniffed at the lie. ‘He nearly did, if you hadn’t shot him first. Shame you couldn’t have done it before he pulled the trigger.’ He Tian gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, then said, ‘Felt some hesitation, did you?’

Guan Shan said, ‘What if I said yeah?’

Somehow, He Tian’s gaze was steady for a few moments as Zhengxi released the bullet, packing the wound with swabs of cotton. He hid drunkenness and agony well enough that it was frightening—and then he closed his eyes with a deep exhale.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he muttered. ‘You still did it.’

 _Right_ , Guan Shan thought, leaning back against the door, staring at the ceiling. The gun was a lead weight against his heart.  _I still did it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or [reblogging the fic on Tumblr!](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/175435360261/fic-nothings-gonna-hurt-you-baby-36)


	4. brotherhood

‘The fuck are you doing here?’

Guan Shan’s hands stilled as he tied his apron around his waist in the close-sized staff room, replete with starched chef robes and bleached dishtowels and the dry smell of lye and dust.

‘Gettin’ ready for my shift,’ Guan Shan answered Zhengxi blandly, his employer standing in the doorway with folded arms. ‘Like I’ve done every other day this week. Is that now a  _problem_?’

‘Yeah,’ said Zhengxi, frowning back at him. He jerked his head backwards. ‘He Tian’s downstairs. You don’t work for me anymore. He’ll fix your paycheck.’

Guan Shan’s tongue took a minute to follow his thoughts, and his hands dropped. ‘He’s  _back?_   _Already?’_

The fight with Sauer had only been a week ago, and Zhengxi had ordered rest for at least a month—received with a snort of drunken, delirious derision. Guan Shan exchanged messages with He Tian over the week, sometimes hand-delivered by Hui Chen, others only telephone conversations that barely lasted a few seconds, during which He Tian gave orders for Guan Shan to witness meetings between his men and clients (furtive, efficient, pre-ordained by He Tian), to check up on the office below the restaurant (eerily quiet and sheltered mutely from the jazz playing loud beyond its walls), to deliver packages to the office in Chelsea (smoke-filled and chaotic).

Sometimes, when He Tian called in the middle of the night and asked him to go to the restaurant and check the guest lists, autumn downpour raging chaotically outside Guan Shan’s window, Guan Shan could only assume He Tian was bored from the confines of his apartment somewhere in New York City, and swore at him as he trekked the way across Chinatown, returning eventually to Jian Yi’s sodden and shivering.

‘He  _shouldn’t_ be back,’ Zhengxi said, voice tinged with disapproval. ‘But I wouldn’t expect anything else. He’d’ve gone to Chelsea the second I wrapped that bullet wound up if he could.’

‘And what about my shift?’ Guan Shan asked. ‘You’re short-staffed.’

Blue eyes looked coolly back. ‘You think there aren’t a hundred other coolies lined up for a job here?’

Guan Shan took the dismissal for what it was, the quiet jab that said he was expendable, and folded his uniform back up with a twinge of resentment and a stiff slope to his shoulders while Zhengxi went back to his office.

He wouldn’t tell Zhengxi, but he’d enjoyed the work for the handspan of time he’d worked there, shouldered with Grey in the kitchens, the closest thing he’d had to home, illusion shattered only the moment he stepped back out onto the streets of his faux-home.

Downstairs, He Tian was perched on the front edge of his desk, lighting up what looked like a fifth cigarette, ashtray full, the bar empty for a few hours yet, and the silence odd, like the evening extravagance was illusory and dreamt-up. He Tian wore a navy suit that made his black eyes look almost blue, his skin a little paler and a little shadowed around the edges compared to his usual pallor, but he was nothing like the person Guan Shan had seen stretched on Zhengxi’s makeshift operating table, strung-out and high on pain and vodka for anaesthetic.

‘You got me fired,’ Guan Shan accused obstinately in greeting.

Something flashed across He Tian’s face as Guan Shan closed the door behind him, but it was too quick to decipher before the amused nonchalance settled back in place, and Guan Shan coasted through his own emotions creaking oddly in his chest, the unoiled hinges of a door growing steadily ajar, the sight of He Tian  _there_ arresting. Going into the office over the past week without its owner had felt like trespassing.

‘I displaced your services,’ He Tian corrected, smoking heavily. A tumbler of something neat and dark was cradled in his left hand.

Guan Shan narrowed his eyes. ‘I worked upstairs all fucking week while I ran your errands. Since when do I need to be here all the fucking—’

 _‘Since I said so,’_ He Tian snapped, slamming the tumbler down behind him with a crack like a gunshot that made Guan Shan flinch. Liquor sloshed over the side of the glass and onto He Tian’s desk. ‘If you’re working for me then you’re loyal to me and no one else. Once you’re  _mine_ , you’re  _mine_.’ He breathed out through his mouth. ‘Alright? Do I make myself clear?’

A stunned, off-kilter silence seemed to throw both of them into a state of wariness.

Guan Shan had the feeling he’d been prodding at a bear’s den for a little over two weeks, and now he was surrendering himself as bait. He blinked, and He Tian had his head in his hand. He blinked again, and the tumblr was righted, cigarette propped once more between He Tian’s lips. Restoring himself was exacted in a few swift moments that couldn’t be smoothly processed, a glitchy realignment that seemed almost procedural. Ceremonial.

 _It’s the pain_ , Guan Shan told himself. A little over a week, and Guan Shan could spot how He Tian favoured his left side, how shifting too suddenly tightened the corners of his mouth, obsidian eyes going flat and dull as coal, how it was an effort to lift the tumbler to his mouth and take a sip—a gulp—the whole glass empty.

‘Good fucking aim,’ He Tian muttered to himself, putting the empty glass down, gentler this time.

Guan Shan didn’t know who He Tian was talking about—Sauer or himself, but he glanced down at his hands. He’d left the gun in Zhengxi’s office to be taken apart and smelted somewhere, walked out while He Tian made half-lucid telephone calls to officers of the NYPD and someone who worked for the Italians about cleaning up a mess.

Sauer’s face was front-page news in the following morning’s  _New York Times_ , smiling and professional and poetically martyred into the seams of bloody political murders. It had been a divorcing experience for Guan Shan, looking at a face laid flat on the dining table that millions of others would look upon that morning, and knowing he’d been the one to kill him, knowing he would be hanged if his name ever appeared in conjunction with the case. If that day came, it would be because He Tian decided it should—or because He Tian’s name was printed on the front page, too.

They hadn’t talked about it—what had happened in the hotel suite of The Pierre. Guan Shan had assumed the lack of conversation was part of the job, by default of it being  _the job_ , but He Tian seemed driven by the prospect now.

‘You really hadn’t shot someone before, had you?’ he asked, mulling something over.

‘First time I held a gun,’ Guan Shan told him. His gaze sharpened, scrutinised. ‘You fucking knew that.’

‘No,’ said He Tian. ‘I didn’t. You  _told_ me that, but I didn’t know it.’

‘You thought I was  _lying_. You fucking thought—’ He staggered to a stop, tongue bitten before he baited the bear a second time. ‘You were testing me,’ he finished quietly.

He Tian looked about to shrug—thought better of it. He took a drag instead and asked through the smoke, eyebrow raised, ‘Can you blame me?’

Confusion clouded Guan Shan’s thoughts, but if He Tian’s motivations were a puzzle, Guan Shan’s must have been a cosmic enigma in return. ‘Your mistrust—Everything that you are—It doesn’t explain why you hired me. Seems like too big of a risk.’ It was a risk to throw the next words out there, but he’d killed a man by now. Nothing seemed too perilous in that scheme of things. ‘If you don’t trust me, just tell me to get out. You’re wastin’ your time proving my loyalty.’

‘I was acting on a whim,’ said He Tian, and Guan Shan’s heart settled only slightly. ‘It paid off.’

‘Is there where I get invited to your little Tong brotherhood now?’ Guan Shan asked dryly. He imagined trading blood with He Tian, indoctrinated into some ritual cult of glorified mobsters, and he scratched at a phantom itch in the centre of his palm.

He Tian’s smile was ghostly. ‘Is that what you want?’ he asked, but didn’t let Guan Shan respond. ‘Fill me in. You did what I asked?’

Guan Shan set his feet further apart, shoulders rolled back. He offered a colourful account of each meeting for which he’d served as He Tian’s silent adjudicator, quipping token pieces of dialogue that made He Tian’s lips quirk with unveiled amusement. Opium and liquor trades were described with all the pomp of an Interpol summit, purchase of sexual services and officer tip-offs like drowsy shipping forecasts. Guan Shan had watched it and remembered and filed each circumstance away for this moment.

He wasn’t to intervene—wasn’t to put himself in harm’s way. He was a silent representation, told to run as soon as a gun was pulled. With every moonlit meeting birthed under the cover of night, Guan Shan had stood in a corner of the room, unsure if he’d run or pull out his own.

‘Your other guys don’t like me,’ Guan Shan told He Tian, finishing up. ‘They think I’m a spy. Kept tripping over themselves when they saw me standin’ there. Asked why you didn’t trust them to handle shit.’

He Tian snorted. ‘I don’t pay them to bitch and gossip. I pay them to do their job. They can dislike you all they want.’

‘If it stops  _them_ doin’ their job, you should be worried.’

He Tian dusted cigarette ash from the fabric of his trousers, pulling a face. ‘You don’t need to tell me when to be worried, Guan Shan. I’ve managed alright on my own.’

Guan Shan looked pointedly at He Tian’s shoulder. ‘Have you?’ he said.

He Tian stubbed his cigarette out, and pointed a forefinger briefly in Guan Shan’s direction. ‘Watch it,’ he warned, letting his hand drop, and tilted his head back to straighten his necktie, shadowed throat exposed, eyes kept lowered so they could maintain contact with Guan Shan’s. ‘Your delinquency is entertaining—but to a point.’

Guan Shan had already seen glimpses of that point. He had a burn mark risen on the back of his hand that testified to it, tender but not painful to the touch, and the cracking sound of a near-shattered whisky tumbler still reverberated in his head. He was conscious of himself enough to admit that there was some perverse, shocking pleasure in bringing He Tian to that edge of revelation.

‘I have a meeting with the Sheriff of Boston shortly,’ said He Tian, smoothing his fingers over the buttons of his waistcoat. ‘You’ll come with me.’

‘Meeting about what?’

He Tian waved a hand. ‘Too many questions,’ he sighed, and pushed himself away from the desk, nostrils flaring as he righted himself and walked towards the door. Guan Shan watched the pain subside like a receding tidal wave, and knew that Zhengxi was right—He Tian shouldn’t have been there. His absence showed weakness, but his weakness showed weakness more.

Guan Shan barred his way. ‘I just want to know,’ he said blandly, ‘if I’m going to be shootin’ another government official today.’

He Tian stopped just before him, close enough that Guan Shan could reach a hand out and touch him, that Guan Shan heard the sharp inhale that whistled through He Tian’s lips.

‘That… won’t be necessary,’ he said, a certain thickness to his voice. ‘I won’t ask you to do that anymore.’

Guan Shan’s features were a question mark, but He Tian’s door opened before he could say anything, and Guan Shan looked back to see Jian Yi’s harried face appear around the frame. He wore a look of panic Guan Shan hadn’t seen before, and it occurred to him that he had never seen Jian Yi and He Tian in the same room, a quick collision of public and private that had to find its place and stabilise quickly—or get left behind.

He Tian’s face, when Guan Shan glanced at him, had fallen.

‘I need to start paying people to tell me good fucking news,’ he said.

Jian Yi was already wincing as the door closed behind him, and He Tian’s darkening look had a palpable  _make it quick_ attitude.

‘You can cut my pay if you want,’ Jian Yi said, running a hand through his loose hair. ‘’Cause you’re  _really_ not going to like this.’

He Tian rubbed at his temples. ‘Out with it.’

Jian Yi took a breath. ‘There’s been a shooting at one of the warehouses. Five of our men and three officers down.’

Guan Shan grimaced.

‘Fucking hell,’ He Tian breathed out, twisting until his back was all that faced them, fists working in a clenching peristalsis, white-knuckled and frantic at his side. ‘How the fuck has that happened?’

‘There’s something else, He Tian,’ Jian Yi said hesitantly, rotating the watch on his wrist with nervous habit. ‘The officers—they were ours.’

The atmosphere degenerated in silence. Guan Shan cleared his throat. ‘Ours as in… the ones you’ve been tipping off?’ he asked.

‘ _Dirty cop friends,_ ’ He Tian muttered to himself, head shaking.

‘Did the guys at the warehouse not know who the officers were?’ Guan Shan asked, questions pushing forward despite Jian Yi’s wary glances.

‘They should’ve done,’ He Tian said. ‘They know not to shoot first. They fucking  _know_ it.’ His adamancy was almost childlike, naive incredulity leaking into the syllables, some wondrous hope squandered and destroyed in front of him with crass imperviousness.

Guan Shan almost felt sorry for him.

‘Maybe they panicked,’ he offered, but He Tian wasn’t listening.

‘Any witnesses?’ he asked Jian Yi. He began pacing while Jian Yi talked, long strides stunted by the small width of the room, a hand swiped carelessly through his hair.

‘One. He saw everything. I heard he’s being taken care of, but I don’t think he’s doing too well.’

He Tian swore loudly, brow drawn low, jaw pulsing; there was a newly hardened severity to his face that was painful to look at. He kept himself so routinely closed-off that any overt displays of emotion were keenly felt. Guan Shan tasted his anger like a bead of sweat dripped from his upper lip, stood drenched in the clouded humidity of his confusion.

‘Both of you wait here,’ He Tian demanded, stalking past them towards the door. ‘I need to make some calls upstairs.’

Jian Yi’s eyes closed as the door slammed shut, the frame shaking with He Tian’s tremulous anger. A poignant silence settled in his wake, unanswered questions a cloying pressure in his office. Guan Shan let his gaze rest on the cane leaning against the back cabinets, and saw it so vividly in He Tian’s grip as it struck Sauer brokenly across the jaw, like a baseball bat or golf club habitually swung. Saw himself, bloodless and unmarked while Sauer’s corpse stared vacantly at the ceiling.

‘Is it payback for what happened to Sauer?’ Guan Shan wondered. ‘Government coming together?’

‘Nah,’ Jian Yi sighed. ‘The police and politicians aren’t brotherly like that. This is something else. He Tian just… he has a lot of enemies. It’s part of the job.’

‘What d’you think he’ll do?’ Guan Shan asked, crossing the room and perching on the same edge of the desk that He Tian had just occupied before Jian Yi beared his news. ‘Kill another politician?’  _Have me kill one?_

‘There’ll be none left by the end of it,’ Jian Yi half-murmured, mind elsewhere. ‘But maybe that’s the point.’ He winced at his own crassness, the reverie broken. ‘I shouldn’t joke like that. These people have families.’

 _‘We_ have families.’

‘It’s different for He Tian. He’s not like the rest of y—of us.’

Guan Shan noticed the slip, but didn’t comment. He didn’t need Jian Yi to point out He Tian’s differences. He recognised the alien in He Tian well enough himself—the otherness that cut him from the rock they all lay against, unnoticed and dull. Even the way he wore his suit and carried his own lithe body encouraged stray, wandering eyes. Something in his breeding reeked of elitism; something in his attitude was soaked in illegitimacy and illegality, crooning and beckoning and planting the seed of its dark allure in open soil. Extravagance didn’t taste the same when it wasn’t built on blood.

‘Will he get revenge?’ Guan Shan questioned. ‘On who did this?’ As far as he knew, that was how the Tong Wars worked—a back-and-forth of souls snatched in the night, one crime for another.

‘He’s not that kind of person,’ Jian Yi said, which was hard to believe. ‘Ruthless and fucking effective, but he’s not driven by anger. He’s driven by—I dunno. Something else. He can be scary as hell sometimes, but then…’ His smile was small and excusable—an apology of a smile. ‘Can’t we all, living in this kind of world?’

‘You trust him,’ Guan Shan remarked. Curiosity twined with incredulity. It was difficult to imagine trusting a man who’s line of business promised fines and imprisonment and capital punishment by mere association. But perhaps that was it—find a man who can both endanger you and protect you in equal measure, and you had nothing but trust.

Guan Shan’s name could have been in the  _New York Times_ ; He Tian could have handed him over and neatly tied up a loose end, but he hadn’t.

‘I’ve known him too long not to trust him,’ Jian Yi told him, a humoured unwillingness breaking free that said he wasn’t sure he was happy about that. He hadn’t chosen his loyalties; time had forced his hand.

Guan Shan was puzzled. ‘I thought he came from San Francisco.’

‘He did,’ Jian Yi confirmed. ‘But so did we. Me and Zhengxi followed him here. Well.  _I_  followed him, I guess, and I wasn’t leaving without Zhengxi.’

‘You gave everything up for He Tian?’

Jian Yi shrugged. ‘It wasn’t giving up. Coming here was an opportunity. And with his brother running things in the west… things were difficult sometimes.’

‘Difficult? How?’

Guan Shan’s interest was piqued but left aflame as He Tian returned to the office, looking no less aggravated than when he had left. He ran his good hand across his face, and glanced around the office like he was rooting out a miraculous packet of painkillers or a strong bottle of gin—maybe both.

‘The Sheriff’s here,’ he told them soberly. ‘And apparently the kid won’t last the night.’

Jian Yi’s face grew sombre and regretful. ‘I’d offer to go see him, He Tian, but I’m doing a favour for Hu Zuiweng. I can’t put her off.’

‘The actress?’ He Tian asked. The name meant nothing to Guan Shan. He’d seen a hundred billboards and tabloid articles and newspaper advertisements for new silent movies, but the superstars had been English and American, classically Hollywood and more classically non-Asian. Film never reached Guan Shan’s village back home, where radios were still a novelty.

‘The one and only,’ Jian Yi affirmed.

‘That’s fine,’ He Tian said, in the tone of voice that said it was the opposite of fine, that his unassailable walls were crumbling down, mortar turning to liquid and brick rendered ashen, his soldiers momentarily looking the other way while a weaponed thief towered the footholds, and Guan Shan felt himself step forward.

‘I could go,’ he heard himself say. ‘I could go talk to the guy. See if he can tell us what happened.’

As one, Jian Yi and He Tian turned to look at him, the former’s eyes bright with witchlight, the latter pensive and weighing and unfathomable.

Deliberation cloaked the air thickly, and He Tian’s brows drew together in a minute frown.

 _I killed a man for you,_ Guan Shan’s answering expression said, stalwart.  _What else do I have to prove?_ What else did he have to do to earn He Tian’s trust enough for him to be able to exploit it?

‘Fine,’ He Tian said eventually. ‘But you’ll come back here after, and take two of my men with you.’

Guan Shan gritted his teeth. ‘You think I can’t handle myself.’

He Tian didn’t even blink. ‘I think I just lost eight men under my protection in a shootout. I’m not taking any risks. Not after…’  _Not after my life is in your debt,_ he didn’t say. He looked at Jian Yi as Guan Shan was forced to stomach the truth of it. ‘And get me a dinner date with Miss Hu. I’ve always liked her movies.’

Despite himself—despite the grim nature of everything that had played out that morning—would  _continue_ to play out like a vine weeping blood as it crept and splintered and poisoned its way through the day—Jian Yi smiled.

‘Anything for you, boss man.’

* * *

One specific, refined detail had been left out in Jian Yi’s relaying.

To He Tian, perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. A man like Sauer would have turned up his nose and caught the rotting stench of infection and walked back out. But Guan Shan was neither of those.  _Inexperienced_ was how he’d felt standing in front of He Tian’s office for the first time;  _inexperienced_ was the sensation of holding a gun for the first time and shooting a man in the back. Inexperienced, but conquerable.

Naively, and perhaps ridiculously, he did not feel like this would be conquerable.

He felt blood drain from his face as the nurse brought him to the room, minutes south of Chinatown and within close range of Brooklyn Bridge. The hallways were cluttered with metal trays like the one that had been in Zhengxi’s office, metal buckets of sudsing water, clean or bloodied, and uniformed nurses who patrolled the wards like bees in a hive.

 _The kid won’t last the night,_ He Tian had said—and he’d meant it literally.

Guan Shan set himself down into the chair at Hui Chen’s bedside. The boy’s face was clean of soot, though dirt was still specked beneath his nails, and his hair had been shaved entirely from his head by the nurses, revealing the soft youth of a kid who’d been failed by the city. By the community He Tian prided himself in ruling. By his people.

Shock was displaced swiftly with anger, a tidal wave of red that tore through the lightning strikes and drowned any lingering spark of surprise. Anger was hurricane-wild, but thick and viscous like clotting blood rain.

He’d seen the images of war—had seen how the soldiers lost limbs and minds from it. He met veterans on the journey to America, uprooted from their homes by madness and an incompleteness that their families couldn’t bare. And he wondered if the same had happened now.

A boy, caught in a crossfire, left to perish alone in a sullied hospital bed. It would have been better—it would have been a kindness—if he’d died quickly with the other men.

‘I’m Guan Shan,’ he told the boy. It was hard to speak. ‘You—delivered letters to me. I live with Jian Yi.’

_In the huge brownstone on Mott Street, with its marbled flooring and grand piano and fresh food prepared daily by a servant._

What an insult.

But Hui Chen turned a clouded gaze to him, lips dry and cracking, skin sheened with sweat, and he smiled. He smiled, while his lungs filled with fluid and he sputtered blood into a used napkin already stained red.

‘I ‘member,’ he croaked, sharply hoarse, chest wheezing, hand dropping beside him with the napkin held loosely in his palm. ‘I like Mr Jian. He’s alrigh’. He’s kind.’

_He’s too busy meeting with some movie star to come and see you._

‘Yeah,’ Guan Shan said. ‘He told me he’s thinking of you.’ Because he knew it was a lie, and because he knew it would go undetected, and because he felt the stinging shame of knowing it wouldn’t matter whether it was fulfilled or not, he said, ‘He’ll be here tomorrow to see you.’

The boy rolled his head back onto the pillow until his eyes fell upon the ceiling, a yellowing fan spinning crookedly and ineffectually above them. His hollowness made Guan Shan pull his chair forward slightly, metal screeching across the floor until his knees knocked against the hospital bed frame.

Hui Chen’s hand lay flat at his side, but Guan Shan couldn’t take it.

‘Hui Chen, I have some questions for you,’ he said. The words were rancid on his tongue. He couldn’t reason why it would have been easier if Hui Chen had been older. Some aging man in his fifties with a life already lived. ‘Questions from Mr He.’

Hui Chen closed his eyes. ‘I don’t know anyfin’. Them officers just started shootin’. I was jus’ deliverin’ a telegram.’

Guan Shan leaned forward. ‘D’you know who the telegram was from?’

‘Unknown sender from Chicago,’ Hui Chen recited, a ringing professionalism like patriotism clinging to his voice. A little soldier trained for battle, effective in theory. Brutalised in practice.

 _Chicago._ Guan Shan’s mind ran through a hundred possibilities, through any mention of the city during his talks with He Tian, the meetings he’d shadowed in the past week. The Sheriff He Tian was meeting with was from Boston. She Li was an unknown prowling the streets of New York somewhere. Sauer’s ancestry was German and he had no family other than a dead mother and a sick father.

This wasn’t an attack on He Tian as a person—this wasn’t vengeance.  _Vengeance_ would be extracted through a bullet wound to the chest that scratched his lungs and made him vomit blood until he died in a dull hospital room with a crooked fan spinning lazily above him.

This was business.

Hui Chen was business.

Anything else, and He Tian would be sitting here in Guan Shan’s place. Revenge, and He Tian would have felt some pang in his coal heart at the thought of Hui Chen waiting for death in this bed. As it was, He Tian had felt nothing.

_Get me a dinner date with Miss Hu. I’ve always liked her movies._

Guan Shan fought with himself, focused his eyes on the boy in front of him, old enough to be his little brother. He was someone’s child. He asked, ‘D’you remember what the telegram said?’

‘Someing… someing about Genesis? Y’know, like in the Bible.  _Read Genesis again_.’

Clouds stirred outside the window of Hui Chen’s room. Another storm gathering, thick with petrichor and replete with soaked skin shivering from a downpour of warm rain, translucent shirts and absent umbrellas, Central Park lush and green and damp and empty, the banks of the Hudson filling and eddying boats buoyantly across its waterways, Chinatown’s streets running filthy and sludgingly until the mud streams met the drains and a rainbow striped across its washing lines and communication poles and met the disc of the sun.

Guan Shan thought of peach-coloured skies, and sunset over the rice fields, and a horizon silhouetted with birds’ wings and—

Hui Chen’s haggard coughing broke through. Flecks of blood and spittle flew onto the bedsheet, and Guan Shan instinctively rubbed a palm over the boy’s back, felt skin and bone through the thin hospital gown, and waited until his breathing had slowed again.

‘I dunno what it meant,’ Hui Chen said wetly, collapsing against the pillows, exhausted. ‘They always use codes and riddles. I never get told.’

‘It’s okay,’ Guan Shan said, and this time he did touch his hand, briefly and pointlessly. Hui Chen’s skin was cool to the touch, and a bead of sweat ran down his temple. Guan Shan swallowed. ‘We’ll figure it out.’

Hui Chen’s cracked lips parted, his breath sticky. Traces of blood filled the corners of his mouth. ‘Thanks,’ he said, brown eyes unseeing. ‘Mr He always said I did good.’

Guan Shan nodded. ‘Yeah. You did real good, kid. Real fuckin’ good.’

Guan Shan watched the boy digest this with a quiet nod to himself of self-pleasure, of accomplishment, and shame filled him. Hui Chen should’ve been given more than the limp praise of someone who barely knew him, speaking on behalf of people he knew would never mean it.

Guan Shan turned when he saw a white shimmer in the doorway, the same nurse who brought Guan Shan through the ward—the only one who spoke Chinese, who told him the bills had been cared for, that the boy was a sweet, poor thing, accusation heavy in her eyes. She carried a tray in her hand, and Guan Shan caught a glimpse of a needle.

‘Morphine,’ she said. ‘For the pain. It’ll help him rest.’

‘Make sure he’s comfortable,’ Guan Shan said, getting up to allow her to work.

‘He’ll be well looked after here,’ she said quietly, and the rest of her words were unsaid and unnecessary. Guan Shan thought them well enough.

_It’ll be the first time in a while._

* * *

‘You  _bastard_. You motherfucking  _bastard._ ’

In the dim light of Xui Ying’s bar, light refracted through He Tian’s glass as he set it down, pressed his forehead into his cupped hand. ‘Sit down, Guan Shan,’ he sighed, kicking the toe of his shoe against the opposite bench in invitation.

There was no one in the bar; Xui Ying was hovering somewhere in a back room, probably on He Tian’s orders. Music played out like the last time Guan Shan had been here, indulging on a free bar tab and the insidious gossip of old men who knew more than he did, but with no one to listen and no thin gauze of conversation, it made the place feel as downtrodden and empty and decrepit as it was.

He hadn’t needed to go back to the restaurant to find He Tian; the ridiculous car parked outside of Xui Ying’s watering hole was enough to divert his course, already extended by a walk through Central Park, avoiding the downpour under the shelter of an oak tree’s boughs until the afternoon stretched and heralded the day’s end. His anger had wilted slightly by the time he was ready to deliver the news to his employer, but suddenly the sight of the car with its huge wheels and glossy black paint and tiered leather seating was  _incensing_.

Guan Shan stayed standing.

‘You  _knew_ how bad he was,’ he seethed. ‘You  _knew_ he wasn’t gonna last the night. He got shot for a fucking riddle and it was all because of  _you_.’ Guan Shan grabbed the bottle of Jack from in front of He Tian and took his own swig, wiping his mouth messily in his sleeve. ‘I knew you were ruthless. I knew you do shit you have to do. But—fuck—where’s your fucking compassion?’

He Tian kept his voice low, kept his eyes on the empty glass in front of him, whisky dregs soaking the bottom. ‘If you know me so goddamn well,’ he said, taking the bottle from Guan Shan’s grip, pouring himself another glass, ‘maybe you’d know I don’t have any.’

Guan Shan’s pulse was frantic in his chest.

There was something tenuous in that—a loose thread of something glimmering like moonlight and starlight and rainwater spun together, a tendril that curled its way from He Tian’s words and… settled there. Bright and luminous and honest in the way that He Tian’s words were not. Guan Shan hung by them, held onto them with a weight he knew wouldn’t hold, and held on anyway.

 _Prove me wrong,_ He Tian was goading.  _Prove to me I’m everything you think I am._

Guan Shan looked at him—really  _looked_ at him, his skin tinged yellow in the low spilling light, his jacket and waistcoat shucked off on one of the stools at the bar, gun on the seat beside him, hair collapsing downwards into his eyes. He held his shoulder at an odd angle, a depressive slouch made awkward and restless.

A wave of tiredness threw itself over Guan Shan without ceremony, or preamble. Fuck, he was exhausted.

He slumped onto the opposite bench. ‘Things go to shit when you start killing people, don’t they?’ he asked, and the question was only half-rhetorical. He could feel the weight of the pistol in his palm, like a phantom limb.

He Tian worked his jaw. ‘Things are already shit if you have to pull a trigger, Guan Shan,’ he said, and winced over a mouthful of bourbon.

‘That kid—’

‘His father died helping the French after the war,’ He Tian cut in, eyes trained on the bottle’s label as he picked it apart with his fingers. ‘He was part of the Chinese Labour Corp on the southern border and caught the influenza. His mother fled to the States and died in childbirth. He didn’t have parents. He didn’t have family.’

_He’s not going to be missed._

‘Jian Yi could’ve fucking helped him. All those favours and he couldn’t’ve taken him in?’

He Tian only shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t have let you go if I didn’t think you could take it. Fuck knows Jian Yi wouldn’t.’

‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’ Guan Shan nearly spat.

He Tian just looked at him, and it dawned on Guan Shan that— _yes_. For the man who trusted no one, sending Guan Shan to wheedle evidence from a dying kid was. And if it wasn’t trust, it was the expectation that Guan Shan would have just enough compassion, just enough sense of duty to go through with it and still find He Tian at the end of it.

After all, he’d pulled the trigger, hadn’t he?

‘Tell me what he saw,’ He Tian commanded.

Guan Shan ran his tongue across his teeth, thought of moonlight shining in through the hospital window, dividing the room into light and darkened shadow, settling selectively on the occupants.

Business.

Guan Shan told him, felt a strange dissatisfaction when He Tian’s confusion mirrored his own when  _Genesis_ passed his lips. He Tian was supposed to have known and understood. Everything was clear-cut to him. Hui Chen wouldn’t die unsolved.

‘Someone doesn’t want me making it easy for people to work here,’ He Tian muttered. ‘Someone doesn’t want China thriving in America.’

Guan Shan put the pieces together. ‘Chinese delinquency gets police officers killed,’ he said. The headline almost wrote itself. ‘The Exclusion Act would never be lifted for treasoners.’

He Tian tipped the bottle in Guan Shan’s direction in mocking salute.

‘Do you think it’s one of us? Causing all this shit?’

‘Sure,’ He Tian said. ‘Get rid of my men and my business falls apart, ripe for plucking. There’s profit to be made off smuggling.’ He shook the bottle. ‘It’s why we don’t want prohibition to end; it’s a money-maker. And if people aren’t drinking, they’re snorting and smoking and injecting and pumping shit in their veins that we make money from.’

‘But it’s fucking expensive,’ Guan Shan pointed out, watching He Tian’s hands work at the label. ‘The—the imports. The pay-offs. The  _protection_. Fuckin’  _legality_ would cost less. And why d’you think it’s the Chinese? It could be the Russians or the Italians who don’t want you stepping on their turf.’

‘Could be,’ He Tian said. ‘But you don’t understand the Tongs.’ He smiled thinly. ‘What kind of Russian sends a Chinese telegram?’

 _You make everything sound simple_ , He Tian had said, but Guan Shan thought he had it wrong. He Tian spoke like everything was obvious. Add nuance and a glittering set of coal eyes and some locked chest of truth bared itself, half-realised thoughts made corporeal. He Tian spoke like he was sharing secrets, and Guan Shan felt strange to be included in that sanctity.

‘Besides,’ He Tian said, ‘if we still have the Exclusion Act, work can be smuggled in from outside and labour is free. We can exploit our countrymen with false promises.’

A ghosting itch manifested itself in the back of Guan Shan’s brain, something pressing that he felt he should have been able to scratch, and couldn’t. Instead, he wrapped his fingers around his nape and dug in.

‘If I wanted to, I’d never have to pay you,’ He Tian continued. ‘If you died building some government tower, your death wouldn’t be a loss. With no papers, no records, you wouldn’t exist. You’d be  _grateful_ for being here.’

Guan Shan let his hand drop. ‘Like Hui Chen.’

He Tian scowled. ‘You don’t know anything, Guan Shan. I paid him. He stayed in my own home. Or with Jian Yi. But some people like the streets better. They know them more than four walls. Some people you can’t help. You think She Li would ever do the same for that kid?’

Guan Shan’s gut twisted; He Tian had pulled him in, almost reeled him close enough that he was believable. A martyr, almost, thinking about what Hui Chen would have  _wanted_. And then changed it—used it for his own vitriolic propaganda. It left Guan Shan feeling hollow.

‘You’re convinced it’s him?’ was all he asked.

‘He’s a fucked up guy that thinks he’s doing the world a favour.  _Those_ are the villains you have to watch out for, Guan Shan. The ones who do what they do because they think they’re  _good._ ’

Guan Shan’s face pinched together. ‘Like you?’

He Tian’s laugh came empty and devoid. There was colour on his cheeks, and his eyelashes were wet. How much had he had to drink? ‘I don’t think I’m doing good. But I’m not putting a needle in someone’s fucking veins either. Everyone has a choice. I won’t pretend like they don’t. I won’t pull the wool over people’s eyes and act like it’s all some fairytale bullshit with black and white where I can be some hero that saves the day.’

And Guan Shan saw it so clearly. How He Tian saw himself—some grim reaper, some suited vehicle for immorality, because immorality was inevitable. And how that fairytale was his own. He wanted to be the hero. Wanted, and was denied the fantasy in a world where kids died in the crossfire and people pumped heroin into their veins out of choice, absent of evil forces and some omnipotent being that  _made_ them. They did it all themselves.

Jian Yi was right. In this kind of world, everyone could be scary as hell. In this kind of world, heroes couldn’t exist.

‘I’m a lot of things, Mo Guan Shan,’ He Tian said hollowly. And then, quieter, ‘You can make your own choice how you see me. All I know is you chose to save my life.’

Guan Shan drew his lip between his teeth, sat in silence while He Tian nursed another glass.

‘I don’t know how I see you,’ Guan Shan told him. ‘I know what I want from you. That’s all.’

The glass hovered mid-way between hand and mouth. ‘That’s something,’ He Tian muttered, and heavy eyes weighed on Guan Shan’s face, tracking the slope of his nose, the shadows cut sharply beneath his jaw, the nursery of freckles scattered over his nose, the angry brow ready to be smoothed away with the brush of a thumb. ‘What is that you want?’

Guan Shan didn’t move. ‘I told you. Money. For my ma.’

‘Of course,’ He Tian murmured under his breath. And then: ‘Your sick, infirm mother.’ The lie sat between them, untouched, like a fire too hot to approach. It had to burn down to cinder and ash before either could hope to put it out and see what was left in the aftermath. ‘That first time you saw me, you said—you said,  _this isn’t right._ What did you mean by that?’

Guan Shan’s breath hitched. ‘I don’t remember. A lot happened that night.’

He Tian blinked slowly, drunkenly at him. ‘Of course,’ he said again.

They looked at each other. Under the table, Guan Shan’s hands were in fists on his thighs. It was cool outside, but the bar felt warm, the air close and humid and singular to the kind of room that was dimly lit and carried the stench of liquor and rotten waste and stale cigarette smoke. There were no fans in here, no windows; the music played, but there was a silence like sound had been snatched away, and all that was left was bourbon trickling into glasses and shallow breathing and thudding heartbeats that were testament to life. The stillness was choking, and He Tian’s dark eyes on him were like staring up at a starless sky and waiting for it to fall.

How would it embrace him, Guan Shan wondered. A swathe of cool silk light on his skin, like expensive bedsheets and imported gowns—or the crushing weight of gravity bringing a universe down on his body, heart burst like a berry beneath a mallet, a small gush of blood that accounted for nothing. All that heat in his veins, all that riotous anger that sat and swarmed beneath his skin until he flamed, quickly spilled. Guan Shan met He Tian’s gaze and knew how easy it would be.

‘Boss.’

They both looked up. Xui Ying had his hands clasped behind his back, towel over his shoulder, the barman in total servitude like a butler. His black eye had faded since Guan Shan last saw him, now faintly yellow, and when he saw Guan Shan, he winked.

‘Sorry to interrupt. I’ve got word from our contacts on She Li.’ The bar was empty, but he still kept his voice quiet. ‘He  _was_ in Chicago, but that was three weeks ago. Whoever sent that telegram, it wasn’t She Li.’

He Tian glowered, and Guan Shan realised Xui Ying had been listening to every word.

‘He could’ve ordered someone to send it,’ He Tian said.

Xui Ying shrugged. ‘Maybe, boss. But we know he didn’t do it himself. He got back into Manhattan last night and—’

He Tian’s glass shot out across the room. Guan Shan froze as fragments exploded against the mirror behind the bar, bourbon dribbling down the sullied reflection of Xui Ying’s stiff back like blood. Everyone froze.

‘Who the hell am I  _trusting_ to fuck me over?’ He Tian growled, face twisted. ‘Who am I fucking  _paying_ to fuck me dry?’

‘Boss—’

‘We should go,’ said Guan Shan in a low voice. ‘If someone sees you like this—’

‘Drunk? Vulnerable?’ He Tian’s laughter cracked out of him. ‘They can come and  _fucking shoot me!’_ The cry reverberated around the bar, glass pieces still slipping over the back of the bar onto the floor, a smashed bottle of damson gin leaking sticky liquor down the wood.  _This_ was what Guan Shan had been waiting for—the outburst, the cold anger from Guan Shan stepping out of line one too many times.

There was something alarming in its nature, that it only reared its head when He Tian wasn’t sober; when he couldn’t help himself. That everything else—quick words that sliced like a blade and the efficient swing of his cane—was soberly, consciously intentional, and not the product of rash impulse.

Guan Shan looked down at the burn mark on his hand, and darted a pointed glance at Xui Ying.

The barman nodded. ‘I’ll get his car,’ he said. ‘Bring him out. We’ll take him home.’

It was an effort. He Tian had had more to drink than Guan Shan thought; his first steps were staggering and heavy while he tried to find his balance, He Tian swearing under his breath, body threatening to teeter towards the floor before Guan Shan caught him, nearly brought down himself by He Tian’s weight. He Tian was taller, built more solidly, and Guan Shan’s body was made of wiry muscle that had been wasting since he set foot on that first boat. Only the heavy drape of an arm around his shoulders offered any ease, and He Tian’s breath caught with each step.

 _He must be in fucking agony,_ Guan Shan thought.  _Guess that explains the bourbon._

Getting through the single door of the bar was awkward, He Tian’s gun holster and discarded clothing juggled over Guan Shan’s arm, and Guan Shan felt like that starless sky had fallen on him, ready to crush him into the pavement outside Xui Ying’s bar, a soundless plea that said,  _Help me_  with every effort to hold itself up.

Guan Shan folded him into the car waiting outside, Xui Ying helping the same way he’d helped Guan Shan, and He Tian’s head lolled on the back seat, Guan Shan clambering in beside him, He Tian’s cane over his knees. Xui Ying locked the door to the bar, settled himself into the driver’s seat of the Phantom, and then he was twisting a key.

‘D’you even know where he lives?’ Guan Shan asked as the engine cracked to life and the car pulled into the road.

From behind the wheel, Xui Ying snorted. ‘I’ve been driving this kid home since he turned up in this city. He only ever shows up at the bar when shit’s going wrong. Can’t handle it.’ He threw the words carelessly over his shoulder: ‘Sorry, boss.’

‘Fuck off,’ He Tian mumbled. The jerky motion of the car had forced his eyes closed, and cool night air blew the dark strands of hair from his face. He looked younger like that, mouth parted, closed lids rendering him sightless, penetrative gaze shut away for a few moments. ‘Who knew it’d be you and me right now?’ he murmured.

Guan Shan glanced at him, processing the words with discomfort. Xui Ying’s words echoed.  _Can’t handle it._

Xui Ying hadn’t been talking about the alcohol; he’d been talking about the fallout. The consequence of lives at stake that crippled He Tian to drunkenness, guilt reducing him to a prone body in the backseat of his own car. Deposited in his apartment at the end of the night. Alone.

_You and me._

‘Yeah, well. You’re not as scary when you’re like this,’ Guan Shan said. He didn’t know why he said it. Something about city air brushing his skin and whisky sloshing warmly in his belly and lights blooming violently on the silk of He Tian’s eyelashes and his drunken vulnerability that made him, for a few moments, unbearably human—neither hero nor villain, but some kid grown up out of San Fransisco’s violence, trying to prove his brother wrong.

He Tian huffed a quiet laugh, looked at him with one squinted-open eye, and said, ‘Liar.’

* * *

He had an apartment on Fifth Avenue— _of course he fucking did_ —the doorman practising the servile art of ignorance as Guan Shan clambered through the lobby with He Tian mostly strung over his shoulder. He palmed the elevator boy a dime for his silent, averted gaze as they creaked upwards to the highest floor, and fumbled with He Tian’s keys before nudging the door open with his foot.

He Tian was deposited on the nearest sofa, Guan Shan throwing gun holster and coat and waistcoat and jacket down next to him, cane left by the front door, and then he took a breath.

The place was stunning, and simple, and punishingly empty. A gilded stretch of windows ran across the far wall that gazed upon New York’s rising cityscape, and the surfaces were fabricated with uncluttered chromes and dark woods and furnishings of unyielding leather, still unworn. There were hints of the age: a tasseled lamp shade burning golden light in the corner of the room, gold-leaf throw cushions on the sofas, a lotus flower made of crystals glittering from the ceiling, and black-and-white marbled floor stretched through the whole apartment in a geometric maze.

But it had not been made a home like Jian Yi’s; it carried no warmth or familiarity like his Guan Shan’s mother’s. This was an empty space for posturing, for returning to when the ritzy evenings came to their inevitable end and the pink-grey haze of dawn blotted the horizon. How many times had He Tian stood here after a night spent intoxicated by people and music, and watched the sunrise, alone, and repeated the same motions the following day and the next and the next and the next, polluted with meetings in his Chelsea offices and dirty killings in Brooklyn and the changing hands of guns and pills and business cards? Was his solitary sunrise worth it?

Guan Shan walked back to him, prostrate on the sofa where he’d left him, an arm strung across his eyes to block out the light, the other left to dangle, fingertips brushing the cold floor.

‘You’re bleeding,’ Guan Shan said. Patches of blood were leaking through his shirt, and Guan Shan stared at it, suddenly so obvious in the warm light of the apartment.

‘Pulled the stitches,’ He Tian muttered, in a voice that said,  _What are you going to fucking do about it?_

Guan Shan’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t hesitate. He hadn’t killed a man for He Tian to bleed out on his sofa from overexertion and untreated infection. He scoped the apartment, found dressings and a bottle of peroxide and a needle in the huge bathroom, and ignored the clawfoot tub that sat arrogantly in its centre. Back in the living area, he cut away He Tian’s shirt as Zhengxi had, kneeling at his side, and let the bloodied bandages pile on the floor at his feet, so conscious that He Tian was just  _letting him._

He Tian was right: some of Zhengxi’s neat stitches had snapped apart and let the skin of the wound part, blood oozing, and Guan Shan swallowed as he soaked cotton with peroxide—and pressed.

He Tian went still.

Slowly, Guan Shan pulled his hand away.

‘D’you need morphine?’ Guan Shan asked. ‘Somethin’ stronger?’

He Tian was barely breathing, holding himself so still that his body was faintly tremoring. ‘I don’t take that shit,’ he pushed out, teeth clenched so hard the words were barely formed. ‘I’ve had a bottle of Jack. Just do it.’

Guan Shan obeyed, working quickly. He soaked the needle in disinfectant and bit his lip as it punctured through He Tian’s skin, tugging the wound closed again with efficient loops. He could hear his own breathing as his hand weaved, felt his heartbeat snapping back and forth against his shirt. This wasn’t like Zhengxi’s office, watching from the corner of the room while He Tian lay elevated on a folding table. This was intimate, Guan Shan snapping the end of the string with his teeth, bandaging it with clean gauze and tape from He Tian’s floor.

He threw the ruined bandages into a waste bin in the kitchen, and filled a glass of water from the tap, everything porcelain and chrome and unbearably clean, like walking through a showroom.

He Tian had loosened on the sofa, jaw clenching only infrequently now, and Guan Shan waited as he drank half the glass, and handed it back. Mindlessly, Guan Shan swallowed the rest.

The bedroom door was staring at his back as Guan Shan stood over He Tian, watching him settle from the trauma, from the alcohol swimming in his bloodstream, and when Guan Shan kneeled again to dab at the sweat from his brow with a cool cloth, He Tian’s tongue seemed to take a while to work.

‘Why is it,’ He Tian started, slurring slightly, ‘that you mouth off at me, and you disrespect me, and you…’ His breath whistled through his teeth, and suddenly his hand was holding Guan Shan’s, cloth soaking sweat from his forehead, hands fever hot on Guan Shan’s skin. His grip was still strong, and Guan Shan thought they had no honest reason being so soft. Guan Shan didn’t allow himself to move. He wasn’t sure he could, even if he’d wanted to.

His heart jolted strangely when Tian’s thumb began moving, a slow, rhythmic brush across the back of his hand, right over the cigarette burn, and it carried with it the bittersweet, lulling feeling one feels right before falling into sleep.

‘You question me all the fucking time,’ He Tian murmured, and Guan Shan watched his eyelashes tremble against his cheekbones. ‘And I’ve only known you a week. And still I…’ Another breath, a ghost of a half smile. He was half-asleep; his words were tenuous strings of senseless consciousness, but the next ones made Guan Shan feel like he had never been more awake.

‘Why does it still feel,’ He Tian said, ‘like you’re the only one I can ever trust?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or [reblogging the fic on Tumblr!](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/175714117681/nothings-gonna-hurt-you-baby-47%22)


	5. secrecy

In the nightmare, Sauer was dead. In the nightmare, Sauer was Sauer, and He Tian—and himself, a flickering movie reel of faces he knew and faces he didn’t, and it hinged on the unreality of everything that wasn’t, balanced at the end of a well-polished gun.

Guan Shan’s hands were bloodied with tar, and the body was clean, and he didn’t have the cognisance to tell himself that this wasn’t real, the edges of sense and nonsense blurred. A tilted sky lit the room, the Pierre Hotel a makeshift creation of false memories and true embellishments. Central Park was swimming past the gilded windows, women in petticoats and rowboats of red, paddles sticking in the inky fluids of their river, stringy and viscous while the sky turned over on itself.

The dead Man That Was and Wasn’t Sauer had found a knife as long as a sword, and Guan Shan’s flesh was cigarette-burn hot as he turned it to himself, pressed it to his throat, and slashed.

 _Genesis_ fell through the gap.

* * *

Guan Shan opened his eyes—and jolted.

Slipping from the nightmare, folding himself out of its falsities, was like a ballerino unfurling from a crouch, but the body standing over him was inescapably  _real_.

He Tian wore nothing but his underwear and the gauze bandage Guan Shan had wrapped around freshly around his shoulder the night before, and in the shadowed light of a grey dawn, Guan Shan couldn’t make out his eyes.

‘You’re in my bed,’ said He Tian.

Guan Shan swallowed, rubbed at his sleep-crusted eyes. His mouth had a thick, sour residue on his tongue from a sleep unfinished, and his jaw ached from grinding his teeth.

‘You took up the couch,’ he replied, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

‘You stayed.’

Guan Shan’s mouth tightened. ‘I didn’t want you to choke on your own vomit.’

‘You stayed in my bed.’

Guan Shan scowled at the emphasis He Tian was putting on it. ‘Stop fucking saying that.’

He reached to draw the sheets over himself—and froze. He Tian’s hand had cut through the darkness, his fingertips nudging against the pulse in Guan Shan’s throat, resting for a moment, trailing down to the sharp protrusion of Guan Shan’s collarbone. His touch was as dry and warm as it had been the night before in the bar, wandering over Guan Shan’s skin like uncharted territory on a map free for the pillaging.

He Tian’s mouth parted, and Guan Shan’s stomach rolled.

‘You’re unbelievable sometimes,’ He Tian murmured. It was too obviously a criticism, edged with displeasure, but what lingered underneath was clear.

Guan Shan understood. He knew what He Tian’s hand was threatening, what shadowed thing would be held promising in his eyes. How blood and life debts and death and orgasm became so easily woven together, so synonymous, a lode star of cathartic sin that pulled and pulled until there was nothing left to give up and give in to. Guan Shan knew that a part of him might have let He Tian because of the job. Because manipulation worked when there were bodies involved. Because people let their guards down when they’d already let people  _in._

But he wasn’t He Tian, or a man like She Li. He knew if he let He Tian, it would be because he wanted to.

His throat ached to swallow as He Tian placed his palm on the side of Guan Shan’s neck, warm and heavy. His silent touch was a question. Guan Shan didn’t remember the last time he’d touched anyone. Been touched.

‘I’ll make breakfast,’ he managed.

He Tian didn’t stop him, only staggered back slightly as Guan Shan swung his legs over the side of the too-big bed and moved out into the kitchen. It was dark, city lights cutting gold shadows through the high windows of He Tian’s Fifth Avenue apartment, and Guan Shan stood with his fingers clutched around the porcelain sink.

 _Fuck_ , he mouthed.

Minutes passed, his heart racketing against his chest like a wasp throwing itself at a closed window, and eventually Guan Shan heard the sound of bare feet padding on marble, and the muted sound of running water in the bathroom. He pulled on his creased clothes from yesterday and scoured He Tian’s mostly bare cupboards while his head span, now and last night colliding into a supernova of he-didn’t-know-fucking-what.

Guan Shan had entertained it, the thought of pressing his mouth to the hollow of He Tian’s neck, the primal urge to have He Tian’s hands on the small of his waist, fingertips in the crease of his pelvis, to scrape his fingers through He Tian’s hair and  _pull_ until they groaned out with the high wavering just above them, just out of reach, onwards.

But it had been the scotch, or the confused loathing, the implicit recognition of a power Guan Shan would never, had never, had.

Nothing could blind cruelty enough.

He Tian emerged while Guan Shan was plating up their breakfast, flicking tendrils of water from his hair onto his shirt. The cupboards were Americanised, and he’d tried to replicate what he’d seen in café windows: thick pancakes with strips of bacon and peppered scrambled eggs that make the apartment smell of sugar and milk and grease. The box of tea leaves and the cast iron pot he found on a shelf was a familiar relief, and the mint settled his stomach.

‘A hidden talent,’ He Tian remarked, perching on a barstool, pouring himself a cup of tea. ‘Maybe this is the work I should have given you.’

Guan Shan glanced warily as he set a plate in front of him. Under his shirt, Guan Shan’s skin felt like it was burning, He Tian’s fingertips a softer burn that promised not to mark.

‘And then who’d shoot your enemies down for you?’ he countered.

He Tian shoveled eggs into his mouth. ‘Was that what you were dreaming? You looked scared.’

Standing at the counter, Guan Shan scowled. He picked at his own plate, drank another cup of tea. ‘That’s actually none of your fucking business.’ He pushed away. ‘Let me see your bandages.’

‘You’ll prod at my body but you won’t let me prod at your mind?’ He Tian questioned. ‘Seems like an imbalance to me.’

‘Only one of them stops sepsis,’ Guan Shan snapped.

He Tian snorted and settled his fork down, already unbuttoning his shirt. Guan Shan felt his eyes on him as he unwrapped the bandages, peering at the wound. It was clean still, the gauze dry. The stitches had held well while He Tian slept.

With a nod, Guan Shan redressed the wound, and motioned for He Tian to re-button his shirt. With a ghosting smirk, He Tian obeyed, and Guan Shan poured them both more tea.

‘Where did you learn to treat wounds?’ He Tian asked, reaching over to thieve a piece of bacon from Guan Shan’s abandoned plate.

Guan Shan leant back against the sink and folded his arms. ‘The nearest hospital was miles away from my village. You learnt the basics so didn’t die before you got there.’ Eyes cast onto the marble, he muttered, ‘It’s not like I could pull out a fucking bullet, but the rest wasn’t hard.’

He Tian arched a brow, but didn’t comment. ‘What about your mother? What illness is she suffering from?’

Guan Shan’s heart let out one single, plangent thud. ‘Cholera,’ he supplied, the lie tasting as thick as sleep on his tongue. He tried not to stutter. ‘She was treated for it a few years ago, but she’s weak. She gets sick a lot.’

‘So you left her.’

Guan Shan stared back at him. ‘I did what I had to do for my family. You left yours in San Francisco.’

‘They’re nothing to me,’ said He Tian dismissively, wiping his hands in a napkin.

‘That’s where we’re different,’ Guan Shan told him, reaching over to pick up his empty plate, refusing to look He Tian in the eye. ‘They’re everything to me.’

* * *

The sun was building on the horizon when they left the apartment for He Tian’s Chelsea office, kitchen cleaned, Guan Shan showered. New York’s roads were already filling with cars and carriages, hot steam from the subway rising up from street grills, a knifing chill in the air that heralded a cold autumn and colder winter.

They turned onto Greenwich Avenue, Washington and Jefferson Park coasting past in a blur of dewy green, morning residences to artists and musicians earning a dime, blooming fountains, and the thin silhouettes of young women pushing strollers in raincoats along paths laden with shedding pine needles.

‘Hui Chen’s probably dead by now,’ Guan Shan said.

‘He is.’ He Tian’s gloved hands flexed around the steering wheel. ‘Jian Yi telephoned while you were sleeping. My men have given him a funeral. He’ll be buried this afternoon.’

The pit in Guan Shan’s stomach buried itself deeper, plucked at his insides like carrion. Hui Chen’s pallid face and He Tian’s drunken words warred with each other. There was barbed wire sitting under Guan Shan’s skin, and as he found himself readjusting to each word that left He Tian’s tongue, it took a token of blood in offering.

Guan Shan pressed his cheek to the window. ‘Life just… goes on for you, doesn’t it?’

‘Life’s never going to stop,’ He Tian said coolly, glancing briefly at Guan Shan in his rearview mirror. ‘You jump on that train and you ride it and take what you can before it stops—or you miss it entirely.’ He shifted down a gear. ‘Something tells me you’re not one to miss it.’

The car keys were taken by a chauffeur when they arrived at the brownstone, and streams of men and women parted absently for He Tian as they pushed upstairs to He Tian’s office.

He Tian’s assistant, Mei Fen, was waiting outside when they arrived, handing He Tian a manilla folder before he’d even walked through the door and carrying a tea tray. The dinner with Miss Hu Zui Weng, she informed him, had been scheduled for that evening at the Phoenix.

‘Make the table for three,’ He Tian had replied, putting his jacket around the back of his chair, his holster on the desk. ‘I want Guan Shan to join us.’

Guan Shan frowned at He Tian after she’d left. ‘Why the fuck d’you want me there?’

‘Why would I not?’ He Tian answered. He ignored the tea Mei Fen had left, and reached instead for a bottle of gin and rhubarb cordial in his cabinet. ‘You work for me.’

‘So does Jian Yi, and Zhengxi, and Mei Fen. Are they coming to meet some fancy movie star too?’ His lip curled. ‘I’m not charity.’

‘Did I say that?’ He levelled his gaze on Guan Shan, face neutral. ‘I want you there.’

Guan Shan scratched at the stubble on his cheeks, and then the muscle in his neck that He Tian had run a finger down. In the space of his office, He Tian’s looks weren’t long; there seemed to be no room for that. No atmosphere for He Tian to indulge in flighting fancy. There was a ridiculous safety in having drugs and guns and prostitutes being of more importance than how Guan Shan’s clavicles might feel beneath his hands.

He risked it: ‘I thought I mouthed off at you and disrespected you?’

He Tian gave no outward reaction. Instead, he stood and faced his cabinets, hand wandering the shelves, and plucked a book from its perch.

‘Here,’ he said, tinged with dry amusement. ‘Keep yourself entertained.’

Guan Shan wandered over, released the book from He Tian’s hold, and flipped it over to the cover.

‘Seriously?’ he said, scowling down at the book in his hand. It was a copy of the Bible, pages gold-leafed and wafer thin, unmarked and intact enough that Guan Shan wasn’t sure it had ever been opened.

‘Figure out what Hui Chen’s telegram meant.’

‘ _Seriously?’_ Guan Shan asked again.

He Tian arched a brow. ‘Is that difficult for you?’

Guan Shan threw himself into one of the studded leather chairs in answer, glowering over the edge of the page while He Tian settled himself behind the desk.

_In the beginning…_

He Tian worked through the morning, slipping in and out of the office for a steady stream of meetings Guan Shan wasn’t partisan to. He smoked his way through a pack of Turkish cigarettes and strong glasses of gin and pink cordial—‘It takes the edge off.’—and Guan Shan combed the pages of Genesis and tracked He Tian’s movements over their edges.

He looked for the man he’d seen last night, looked for any sign of who had showed himself under a haze of booze and anger and soft vulnerability. There was only a weighted, crushing truth to his observations: the only man present in Guan Shan’s line of vision was one who’d had a boy buried that morning, and would have signed Guan Shan’s father’s life away on a dotted line with an easy, cursive swipe of his fountain pen. Not out of active cruelty, really. Not as Guan Shan had thought. He Tian’s practicality was a brand of ruthless efficiency, just as Jian Yi had said the day before. But passive heartlessness was cruelty in itself.

‘Are you going to keep staring at me?’

He Tian wasn’t looking at him. Guan Shan resented the fact that he was.

‘I’ve been thinkin’,’ he said. ‘About this.’

He Tian turned over the sheet of paper he was writing on. ‘And?’

‘The seven day creation. Adam and Eve. The snake. Cain and Abel. The flood. Abraham. Sodom and Gomorrah. Joseph’s dreams.’

‘You’re just listing a summary.’

‘Right,’ Guan Shan said. He shifted in his seat; his back was aching from the stillness. ‘Which is exactly what the message was. It wasn’t an  _instruction_. It wasn’t some tip-off. It was just statin’ shit we’re not going to understand until it’s too late.’

He Tian glanced up. ‘You underestimate me.’

‘I don’t. I’m being realistic about what you’ve been given. What have you or your men figured out from any of it?’

He Tian folded his hands on the desk. ‘We haven’t yet.’

‘Have you spoken with the Commissioner? Anyone from the NYPD?’

He Tian’s exhale whistled through his teeth. ‘That was my ten o’clock,’ he told Guan Shan patiently. ‘They’re denying all responsibility for the shooting. Their records show a call was made with reports of violence at the warehouse, but nothing more.’

‘What was being made there?’ Guan Shan asked.

‘At the warehouse? Rifles.’

Guan Shan dragged his thumb over the pages of the Bible, paper fluttering against his skin. ‘And the call they got didn’t say anythin’ about the guns? It was just about violence, not illegal production?’

He Tian nodded his head. ‘You understand,’ he said. ‘None of this was about bringing down the business. They want that intact. They want my product. They just don’t want me or my men. They don’t want my ideals. I want assimilation, and that’s a dangerous one.’

‘Why did they shoot? If they knew who you were?’

He Tian’s smile was bleak. ‘If the officers were still alive, the Commissioner would have answers for me. But for now, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why were my orders usurped by those officers, and who’s powerful enough to make them?’

Guan Shan scratched at the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s not like you can tell the Commissioner to go fuck himself.’

He Tian allowed a smile. ‘He’s necessary.’

Guan Shan reached for his temples, an ache building steadily. The Bible sat open in his lap, a page-spread drawing staring up at him, Cain pinning his brother down, the bellied snake curled around the branches of a tree.

‘This is fucking useless,’ he muttered, and snapped the book shut. He tossed it on the desk with a thud. ‘Hui Chen would have figured this out better than me.’

‘Hui Chen was a child with a good memory.’

_Was._

Guan Shan cast He Tian a pointed look, and the man sighed. ‘You’re right,’ said He Tian. ‘Maybe I’m being unfair. There are a lot of unanswerable variables.’ He twirled his fountain pen absently in his fingers, and propped a cigarette between his lips. ‘Maybe we won’t know until it’s too late.’

‘Are you gonna blame me when we do?’

He Tian reached for his lighter. ‘Why would I do that?’ he asked around the cigarette as it caught flame.

His confusion was genuine, but Guan Shan said it anyway. ‘You’re the kinda guy who likes answers. Who likes using people as answers.’ Guan Shan waved the book in his hand. ‘You’ll think it’s my fault for not getting it now.’

‘That’s the thing about me, Guan Shan,’ said He Tian, exhaling smoke like a sigh. ‘There’s never anyone to blame for any of this but myself.’

* * *

They left while the sun was sinking behind New York’s grey skyline. He Tian’s car was brought around to the entrance, afternoon rain showers soaking the tarmac and spilling down the streets, and petrichor filled Guan Shan’s lungs.

He Tian left him at Jian Yi’s empty house to pillage the cupboards and dress for dinner in the basement of the Phoenix, Zhengxi’s restaurant, and soon enough Jian Yi’s grandfather clock was chiming solemnly for eight o’clock. Outside, Mott Street had become a strip of darkness punctured by lanterns and gloaming shop windows.

Zhengxi nodded at him as he slipped downstairs to the bar, the evening entertainment already under way, a plucky jazz tune crooning through tables of women in mink coats and mustached men in trilby hats. Smoke cloyed the basement bar, and He Tian was a dark figure at the table in the center of the room. At his side was Hu Zui Weng. Guan Shan almost faltered.

An arrow-straight nose, poised lips painted blood red, eyes dark enough to swallow a man whole. The string of diamonds around her neck glinted, and she smoked with a cigarette holder that was as glossed black as the velvet of her dress and chingon hair, décolleté exposed, skin pale as powder. Guan Shan found himself morbidly fascinated by her; he had never seen a woman like her in his village. He had never seen a man like He Tian, either.

He Tian stood as Guan Shan approached, introducing him to the star with a smile of pleasantry that he’d never worn in Guan Shan’s presence before. Something jovially professional; it made promises that wouldn’t hurt to keep.

‘Mr He tells me you haven’t seen any of my movies,’ Zui Weng said as Guan Shan sat down.

‘I don’t have the time,’ Guan Shan told her. ‘Sorry.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t be. The authenticity is refreshing. Mr He sent me roses like the lover from my most recent performance. I’m sure  _you_ would be more thoughtful.’

Guan Shan glanced at He Tian, who was watching the conversation unfurl over the lip of his wine glass. ‘Flowers die,’ Guan Shan said. ‘If I had his paycheck, I’d get you another diamond to put around your neck. You seem to like them.’

A coy smile. ‘This thing is so heavy. Any more and I think it would snap my throat.’

He Tian leaned across to refill her glass. ‘And then no one would want to dine with me.’

‘Do you give anyone a  _choice_ , Mr He?’ she asked, eyebrow raised.

‘Rarely. I find people usually want their decisions made for them.’

Her lips shone red with wine. ‘How severe.’

The evening passed like that. They worked through a bottle of wine, two, and Guan Shan warmed in the suit He Tian had sent to Jian Yi’s house for him to wear. Their conversation was familiar, placid flirtatiousness that made Guan Shan feel like an intruder, chatting about Hollywood and the recently insidious actress suicides in the East, China’s arts industry and how He Tian would like to get his hands onto something like that. Cued, Zui Weng looked at his hands.

Guan Shan thought about those hands on his, and last night’s revelation, while waiters brought their three courses and boomeranged with wine and sweet liqueurs and buckets of ice. He thought about those hands on the ridge of his cheekbones, and collarbones, and where they might have travelled had Guan Shan laid there silent in his bed and let him.

The touch hadn’t been unpleasant. He Tian’s blurred admittance hadn’t been unpleasant. It was shocking. Sweet and sharp as a blood orange.

Guan Shan broke through the reverie as Zui Weng stood and excused herself to powder her nose.

He looked at He Tian. He Tian swiped vanilla pod ice cream from his plate with his forefinger and looked at Guan Shan.

‘Are you going to fuck her?’ Guan Shan asked.

He Tian sucked his finger clean, wiped it in a cloth serviette. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Would it bother you if I did?’

‘I don’t give a fuck what you do. I just work for you.’

He Tian kept his gaze, remembered to smoke his dwindling cigarette where it was balanced on the ashtray. He tapped it and said, ‘Then why did you ask?’

‘So I can figure out why the fuck I’m here if you’ve got an agenda with her.’

‘An agenda,’ He Tian echoed. ‘That’s uncouth.’

Guan Shan glowered. ‘And you’re not as fucking  _refined_ as you like to think you are.’ He ran his finger around the base of his wine glass, and his voice dropped. ‘I know what you wanted this morning. Last night.’

‘Good. I wasn’t trying to be implicit.’

Guan Shan drew back, shuddering. ‘You’re disgusting.’

The look He Tian gave him was like being torn in two, and Guan Shan knew with immediate certainty that he deserved it. He knew the searing feeling through his chest was worthy of being felt, because he had been thinking of He Tian’s fingers pressing and bruising on his skin and the indulgence had been only  _want._

He had been thinking about broad shoulders and scarred muscle and the veins that stood out under the man’s skin. And then the mess on their stomachs and down their thighs and the sour blood caked under their nails, skin ripped red-raw, the stringy saliva from their teeth and the potential for their mouths to mash together in a battle of sharp incisors and warring tongues, sex like a fight, soft hands pawing at limbs and soft lips after their small, spent little deaths.

The fantasy was richer than the wine, thicker than the syrupy liqueur. Guan Shan wanted to lick it from his fingers like vanilla pod ice cream, taste the cigarette smoke and dark cologne He Tian brushed on his throat.

And then He Tian laughed. A belated, breathy thing that that said everything flashing in Guan Shan’s mind had played out in his amber eyes, ripe for the taking.

‘Heaven wasn’t made for me, Guan Shan,’ He Tian told him, in the same way he had said,  _You’re unbelievable._ In the same way his mouth had formed the word  _trust_ the night before.

The words knotted in Guan Shan’s belly, and he stared back in silence.

Zui Weng was smiling as she returned, slipping her way through tables. She pressed her hands onto He Tian’s shoulders. ‘I hope you two weren’t fighting over me. It would be an awfully hard decision.’

‘And one we would never force you to make,’ He Tian replied easily, tilting his head back. ‘We’re far too unrefined for a woman like you. We know a lost cause when we see one, don’t we, Guan Shan?’

Guan Shan only stood. ‘I’ll get us another bottle of wine. Give you a minute alone.’

He ignored their mild protests, and headed the way Zui Weng had just come, a trail of perfume left in her wake, citrus and cardamom.

At the bar, Guan Shan breathed deeply. He pushed himself back and forth from the glossed cherry wood surface, biceps shaking with the rest of him. A barman beelined for him, took his order, and Guan Shan loosened his tie. The bar had grown warm as the night stretched, bodies and candlelight and cigarette smoke whorling hotly, kept contained with red brick and lacquered wood and a windowless space that made Guan Shan feel small. He pictured He Tian returning to the spanning emptiness of his apartment once the night was over, unlived and unloved, and wondered what it was He Tian was searching for.

_I wasn’t trying to be implicit._

‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

The voice was close, direct enough that Guan Shan flicked his gaze over. The silver-haired man was looking at him, body turned in his direction, fingers loose on the fluted stem of a champagne glass.

‘If you like that sort of thing,’ Guan Shan replied.

Thin lips stretched in a sharp smile; it was the strange lighting of the bar, the flickering of oil lamps, but for a moment his eyes glinted yellow.

‘Do you not, Mo Guan Shan?’ When Guan Shan’s mind shuttered at the casual mention of his name, the man tilted the glass in his direction. ‘Really, it seems people don’t know whether to discuss you at He Tian’s table or Zui Weng.’

Guan Shan wished he had something to drink, something to sweat in his hand, something to burn down his throat. ‘Who did you decide on?’ he asked quietly.

‘Your name is so familiar to me, I couldn’t focus on any movie star.’ He leaned in slightly, silver hair startling as it glinted brightly in the dark room, and asked, ‘Does your father live in the city?’

Guan Shan stilled.

Wine threatened to rise up through Guan Shan’s throat; goosebumps ran across every patch of flesh they could find. This was a drunkenness that tasted of charred earth and falling stars and a world torn apart and flipped outwards, innards on show, exposed with a vulnerability that wasn’t like He Tian’s, benign and quietly unintended, a token gesture of soul-bared honesty.

This was violent.

‘What?’ said Guan Shan, and he didn’t remember hearing his voice ever so clear, like a vacuum had been ripped in the space around him until the only sound that existed thrummed from his own vocal chords, the vibration of his hoarse voice.

‘No,’ said the man, accepting a refill of his glass. ‘I must be mistaken. Apologies.’

‘No, wait—’ Guan Shan started, but time had skipped around him; the man was already being swallowed up through the throng of guests, growing louder and riotous and more outstanding, and Guan Shan couldn’t be sure he hadn’t imagined him.

A day combing Genesis, and Guan Shan felt like he had met the snake.

He took the drinks left before him on the bar, hands trembling, and returned to the table in a stupor.

Zui Weng had left once again, and Guan Shan spotted her near the stage, smiling brightly before a crowd of Chinese women with napkins and pens held out in hopeful adoration. He Tian was alone at the table. He looked up at Guan Shan with a small, lazy smile, and if Guan Shan’s mind would have rioting, he would have flushed to be looked at like that: welcomed, quietly pleased for his company.

Guan Shan came closer, settled the drinks down, and He Tian’s eyes tightened, mouth grew firm.

‘What is it?’ he said, straightening. ‘Something’s wrong.’

Guan Shan shook his head. ‘There was a man—’ He clenched his jaw. ‘Who’s the guy here with silver hair?’

He Tian seized up, his stillness statue-like. ‘Where?’ he pushed out.

‘He was at the bar,’ Guan Shan told him. ‘I can’t see him.’

He Tian pushed violently to his feet. For a moment, heads turned, the jazz band faltered; Guan Shan saw men and women duck like they were waiting for gunshots and cracking plaster and orphaned bottles smashing to the floor, blood confused with wine. And then the buoyancy of the evening continued in its typical splendoured haze. After a few seconds, He Tian lowered himself back into Zui Weng’s chair, and leaned close to Guan Shan’s face, breath hot with sweet wine and cigarettes.

‘Tell me everything he said.’

Something in Guan Shan’s stomach tightened. ‘Tell me who he is.’

‘I’m not fucking around, Guan Shan,’ He Tian warned.

Anger flared, and Guan Shan didn’t avert his gaze.  _This_ was what he would die for, if He Tian chose his time now, and he wouldn’t have objected. He said, ‘Neither am I.’

He Tian exhaled sharply. His fingers went to the handle of his cane. ‘So fucking stubborn,’ he said, eyes closed. They were pitch when he opened them again, light swallowed around them—they gave nothing out, let nothing in. ‘His name is She Li.’

The name fell flat as a stone through water, and it didn’t surprise Guan Shan. He tasted it with distant understanding, brain receptors connecting name to face and producing something unremarkable in its wake.  _Who_ he was was less important than what he’d said.

‘He asked me if my father lived here,’ Guan Shan told He Tian. ‘In New York.’

Guan Shan watched as He Tian’s eyebrows drew together, lips pressing thinly. He fingered at a ring on his thumb, and Guan Shan’s eyes lingered on the absent motion. The confusion was too exact. Too real. He Tian didn’t know what Guan Shan was talking about. The facade, if it was one, was perfect.

‘What are you talking about?’ He Tian said eventually.

‘My father.’

‘Yes, and why would he be  _here?’_ He Tian asked.

His confusion was as authentic as the diamonds around Zui Weng’s neck, glittering and obvious and perfect, and it made Guan Shan  _angry_. He gnashed his teeth together, felt them grind under his gums until they ached. It was the kind of anger that nudged at the ridges of his spine and pricked tears in his eyes like a wellspring forced up and out and fucking  _somewhere_ but the crushing heat of the underneath. It bit at him, so sharp and so sweet.

‘Because you brought him here,’ Guan Shan said. ‘Thirteen years ago. Your name—on his contract.’

A bottle of wine and more down, and He Tian’s brain still worked fast. His expression—wary, agonisingly  _concerned_ —changed. He wore an understanding that was frightening.

‘And that’s why you’re here,’ he said flatly. ‘Looking for him.’ A beat of silence, and he wiped a hand over his face. ‘Your mother isn’t sick, isshe?’

Guan Shan could have said nothing. He could’ve stopped now, but She Li’s words were a knife sliding under his skin and the rest of him, still, was screaming out. He was a hide of raw flesh scrabbling for defence. The jazz band played out loudly around them, bouncing and well into the swing. A few couples were dancing; a few stood around with glasses of champagne and wine held aloft. Guan Shan briefly admired their cheery naivety, envied it.

He said, ‘He could be dead because of you.’

He Tian swallowed this, and when his gaze settled, he looked at Guan Shan like he’d looked at Sauer. He flicked his fingers towards the man he’d said he trusted. ‘Are you going to kill me, Guan Shan?’ he asked quietly. A cigarette flared between his lips. ‘Because my name was on some fucking piece of paper?’

Face swimming in smoke, he sounded tired. He sounded like he had when Jian Yi brought the news about the warehouse, when Guan Shan found him later, half a bottle of Jack down and torn a little on the inside. He made Guan Shan forget that he was cruel and cold and lethal—made himself feel like it instead. The switch was impressive, and it cut to the marrow.

‘I’ve thought about it,’ Guan Shan admitted.

He Tian looked at him. ‘Well think about this: I wasn’t in the city thirteen years ago. I was a sixteen-year-old kid following his brother’s orders in San Francisco. Anything I did—anyone I gave employment to was on his orders.’

‘You still did it.’

He Tian scraped a thumbnail across his jaw. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m fucking not. I can’t recall a single fucking contract I handled until I came here.’

Guan Shan’s intestines were twisting; He Tian was close enough that he filled Guan Shan’s line of sight entirely, black silk and black hair and black eyes. He dressed like the devil, surrounded himself in sin, and Guan Shan raged with himself. A part of himself wanted to believe in the honesty of a gangster.

The question was childish, and showed his hand, but he asked it anyway: ‘How do I know you’re not lying?’

‘How fucking—’ He Tian cut himself off, killed his cigarette, snatched a second—third? Fourth?— from his case, and lit the flame with a sharp, blooming spark. He pointed the cherry of it in Guan Shan’s direction. He hadn’t read as angered until now. ‘You’re going to talk to me about  _lying_ , Mo Guan Shan? You’re in my fucking employ because I put my  _trust_ in you. I  _trusted_ you with my business. I  _trusted_ you with my life.’

Anger rolled from him now; his words came out like the splintering crack of ice melting in a warmer climate, each one exact and distinct as a stalactite plummeting to the floor of a cave. Guan Shan had been waiting for it.

‘And I saved it,’ he reminded He Tian. ‘You’d be dead without me.’

Something between them collapsed, the hot, charged air of a storm dissipating in a breeze. He Tian thumped against the back of his chair. His cigarette dwindled to ashes on the floor. He murmured, ‘And now I really don’t know why.’

Guan Shan breathed the moment down, and a warped honesty leaked out. ‘I don’t either,’ he said.

* * *

They sat through the rest of dinner. Spirits flowed eagerly into clean glasses, a platter of fresh fruit was brought out and abandoned on the cloth, and Guan Shan sipped at a glass of ice and vodka and pretended to be raptured by the band. He Tian kept up the facade well enough for Zui Weng to notice but not comment. His smiles sat too tightly at the corners of his mouth; his words pinched around his tongue like bruised lingonberries.

The band would have played all night if He Tian wanted them to, but as midnight struck New York, Zui Weng pressed a hand to her mouth, yawned delicately, and excused herself with tiredness. Her departure was gracious, and graceful, and her lips were warm when they pressed themselves to Guan Shan’s cheek. He breathed in cardamom and her red-wine breath.

Zui Weng parted from them, clutch bag tucked under her arm, dark eyes settling into a liquor vacancy, the helpless slackness of her mouth more pronounced.

‘Be good to each other,’ she told them, flicking her wrist in a farewell wave.

Guan Shan swallowed this while the sheen of her dress caught the low light of the bar, until she was led from the room by hired muscle, and the nape of her neck dipped out of sight.

‘I’ll go,’ said Guan Shan.

A hand wrapped itself around his wrist. ‘No,’ said He Tian. ‘You’ll come with me.’

The wound, already open, started weeping. Guan Shan tasted pennies on his tongue; he had the impulse to wipe the creep of liquid from his eyes that would brush off red on his fingers, and when he did, there was nothing.

How strange, he sometimes thought, that pain on the inside could be felt so keenly, so wrecking, organs twisting against their bones, with nothing to show for it. But he remembered that the heart was only a muscle, that everything  _felt_ by it was manufactured by the brain and responses to external stimuli, that he was just an animal walking on two feet and pretending to be ‘human’. He remembered that moments of existentialism didn’t fucking suit him for shit.

He went with He Tian.

Outside, the air was chill and autumn air bit at Guan Shan’s cheeks and unprotected hands. A breeze tugged over Chinatown from the East River, and whipped red strands around his face until his eyes watered. There was a rock sinking into the pit of his stomach as he kept pace with He Tian through the streets. They walked down St James’ Place, and onto Frankfort Street, and with another turn, the steel wires and towering pylons of Brooklyn Bridge shot out above them.

Guan Shan wanted to laugh. This was opportune; this was  _easy_. A lone car passed them, headlights bright, and water lapped below in dark, satiny waves. He Tian cut a dark figure under the leaking gloam of moonlight; his cane was ineffectual for his movements, but the swift, thudding click along the sidewalks kept time with Guan Shan’s booming heartbeat.

‘Is this where you shoot me and throw me into the river?’ Guan Shan asked, almost halfway across the bridge. His voice wavered, teeth shaking against his lip. His hands were fisted in his pockets against the cold.

‘Thought about it,’ He Tian said, without stopping, throwing his raised voice backwards to be heard over the wind. ‘Still thinking about it.’

Halfway across, He Tian came to an eventual stop. He folded his arms against the railing and looked out, and Guan Shan looked too.

Lights sparked like mayflies along the banks of the city, catching on billows of smoke from the warehouses and cargo ships that teemed along the East River. Buildings reached tentatively upwards, scaffolding and construction hidden under the cloak of darkness, lending a beaded, glowing beauty to a city which, in daylight, was a different beast to conquer. In the day, it was filthy and brown and dullness was a hard thing to hide.

At night, blood wouldn’t look like blood.

At night, He Tian’s face was full of shadows, and Guan Shan was struck, not for the first time, by the structure of his bones and the oil-spill eyes. He was made for this, made to be seen in black under moonlight and the silent flaring of impossibly distant suns. Harsh lines were softened; shadows were severe. He Tian could hide in this and thrive.

Guan Shan shivered, standing to the side. He didn’t dare touch the railings, which would be ice under any bare glimpses of his skin. But the method meant he would see when He Tian struck— _if_ he struck. He would see the lunge, casual and quick as pressing a cigarette into the back of a hand. He would see the moment before the shock of adrenaline, before the starlight burst of pain on the back of his eyelids, before he swayed and carried himself into the river below. At He Tian’s side, shifting posture could be confused for the sinking-in of a knife; the twist of a torso concealing a revolver.

‘You could’ve come to me,’ He Tian said, after a few minutes had passed. ‘Could’ve just asked.’

Guan Shan raised a hand against the wind, swept away salt-water tracks from his cheeks. ‘I don’t know that it wasn’t you. I didn’t. He’d just be some fucking drug mule for you to exploit.’

He Tian shook his head, looking out. He filled the same position as Guan Shan had created in his head last night in the apartment, like a figure transposed onto a photograph: watching the scope of a city so full of people, entirely alone. A barman to drive him home, a stranger to put him to bed. Even Zhengxi seemed to resent pulling the wound from his shoulder.

‘All this could’ve been averted,’ He Tian muttered, half to himself. ‘Among other things, I want to knock your jaw in.’

‘Fine,’ said Guan Shan. The cold spurred him on—at least a fight would warm his blood. But he’d watched He Tian with Sauer; speed would be on Guan Shan’s side, the drive of fury and resentment and pure fatalism, but he knew he wouldn’t win. ‘Do it. I’ve got nothin’ fucking left.’

He Tian’s eyes narrowed on Brooklyn’s horizon. ‘That’s a lie. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t. It rang true when you said family was everything to you.’

He Tian knew he was right, and that shaped Guan Shan’s shoulders down. If He Tian could see some kind of truth beneath a blanket of lies, what else was he seeing?

_You were wrong to put your trust in me. You’ve been right not to put your trust in anyone._

He felt the words, felt the shape of them on his tongue, but some words were only meant to be thoughts. Some didn’t sound right with his voice; they had an eloquence he didn’t deserve with his scratchy, clipped tone that came out like a snarl. They had an emphasis he didn’t have the right to express when it carried itself in anger, always anger. What else, uncontrollable, had he ever known how to feel? He’d crawled out the womb spitting red.

‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to say,’ he admitted. He was cold, and there was nowhere to go. If He Tian wanted to stand on the bridge all night until a cold, bleeding light came at dawn, Guan Shan would stand here too.

He Tian slid his hand into his pockets, and he turned, the base of his spine against the railing. ‘You betrayed me, but you saved my life. Took a man’s life for mine. I’m in your debt.’

Guan Shan swallowed. ‘Thought you didn’t believe in all that Tong brotherhood bullshit.’

He Tian’s eyes flashed. ‘I believe in knowing when someone’s done something for me they didn’t have to. Something they shouldn’t have. It was against your better judgment.’

‘I don’t have one of those,’ Guan Shan said baldly. ‘I just do shit and hope for the best.’

He Tian blinked at that. He huffed something like amusement, murmured something under his breath that was lost to the wind, and settled his gaze on Guan Shan. His lips were wet from the swipe of his tongue, and the weight of his eyes was heavy.

‘I owe you, so I’ll help you. It won’t take long.’

Guan Shan looked at him warily. ‘Help me with what?’

He Tian said, ‘I’ll help you find out where your father is.’

Guan Shan heard the words like a punch to his solar plexus. He moved backwards helplessly, but He Tian’s hand shot out again to pull him in. Guan Shan made to yank it away, but behind him, a car sounded its blaring horn, shooting past over the bridge, close enough to graze, and Guan Shan’s heart pounded achingly between his ribs.

He Tian’s grip on his arm was sure, his look swollen with an intensity that pitted somewhere low in Guan Shan’s stomach.  

‘Or you could kill me,’ Guan Shan said, voice tight like he was struggling for breath. ‘No fucking debt.’

‘I could,’ He Tian allowed. He had Guan Shan close, his body pressed against most of Guan Shan’s side. The cold had been misplaced; Guan Shan almost wanted it back. Almost. ‘But I told you. There’s something… about you.’

Guan Shan searched his eyes, found He Tian doing the same. Were they looking for the same thing? Was He Tian seeing the answers, of which Guan Shan had found none?

‘You want to help me,’ he said. The flatness of his voice met his ears strangely.

‘I have the resources.’

Guan Shan said, ‘And then what? You help me, and then what?’

‘And then we’re even,’ He Tian replied simply. Like this was  _simple_. ‘And you can go back to China. If that’s what you want.’

The city, so quiet and dark before, save for the whiplash of an autumn wind, was deafening now. Every clatter of hooves on cobbled streets, every wildly blaring car horn, every boat that chugged its way mournfully beneath the bridge—it was cacophonous, and Guan Shan was struggling to think. A headache bloomed while he pieced together what He Tian was offering him, why he was offering it. The man who may have signed Guan Shan’s father away to a sullied, ignoble death.

What if all Guan Shan found were the remains?

 _Don’t you fucking dare,_ he snapped at himself.  _You didn’t come here to find a body._

But it didn’t mean the possibility didn’t linger there, ghost-like and crying out to Guan Shan from beyond some rift that he refused to acknowledge, the picture of a shattered home he wouldn’t let himself accept as a forever.

The cold air now seemed suffocating. He Tian was so still. Waiting. He let Guan Shan’s arm go, the loss of touch lingering like the reluctant parting of lovers, and then, as it had that morning, He Tian brought it up to rest on Guan Shan’s cheek, a shock of warmth against his wind-bitten skin.

Guan Shan couldn’t hide his flinch. A step back would put him on the road, and forward would lead him closer—or into the river. He bore the touch. Pretend the warmth wasn’t wanted, that the press of skin against his own didn’t carry a torch through the caves of his body.

‘Let me,’ He Tian murmured, his thumb marking the highest ridge of Guan Shan’s cheekbone. ‘I know you want to say yes.’

Guan Shan’s throat clicked dryly. ‘You’ve given me no fucking reason to trust you. Not like I have.’

He Tian moved closer. ‘Then let me give you one.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or [ You can also find ways of supporting me as a writer by visiting my Tumblr.](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/176138679396/nothings-gonna-hurt-you-baby-57)


	6. lust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're nearly there! Thank you so much to Tracey for requesting this fic, and for everyone who's been supporting this fic so far; I'm so grateful for it. If you want to support me further, [please check out how on my Tumblr](http://agapaic.tumblr.com). 
> 
> I've also been a little busy lately, which is why this chapter is coming later than usual, but I promise I'll be catching up with all comment responses soon! Please know I read every single one of them and they're so appreciated.

Sex wasn’t trust.

Sex wasn’t anything but a careful movement of bodies pulling and pushing magnet-strong until a galaxy burst on the back of your eyes and an earthquake rose up and shuddered through your bones with dense orgasms and hitched throats.

That’s what Guan Shan told himself as he rode the elevator to He Tian’s apartment, kept himself at arm’s distance. It’s what he told himself as He Tian locked the door behind him and let his jacket fold over the back of the sofa. It’s what he told himself as they clinked glasses of whisky and he winced at the deep burn around his gums, around the back of his throat, as He Tian chased it down with his lips and Guan Shan tasted liquor and cigarettes and the small, hot heat of his tongue. 

There was no preamble, as Guan Shan knew there wouldn’t be. There was no delicacy, or gentleness, like that took the kind of time that He Tian didn’t have. There was no hesitation in his fingers as he tugged buttons through the loopholes of Guan Shan’s shirt, or uncertainty as he tugged the slacks from Guan Shan’s hips and left them pooling on the floor.

His mouth pressed hard behind Guan Shan’s ear, tugged violet bruises on the side of his neck, insistent hands pushing at Guan Shan’s shoulders until the backs of his knees hit the bed, and Guan Shan went with the motion.

‘I thought about your mouth the second you got on your knees.’

It brought Guan Shan back into himself, made him aware of his own presence, perched on the edge of He Tian’s bed while He Tian stood before him. Autumn air and The Phoenix’s red wine played strangely in his head; he wanted to feel good. He wanted to get off and feel the warm spurt against his own hand. He wanted someone else to do it for him. The realisation that it might be He Tian, who would suck cock as well as he placed his lips around a cigarette or a rim of a glass, was a heavy, lolling weight in the centre of him—a bell knoll ringing out loud in his ears and stealing the breath from him.

Guan Shan was hard and flush against his stomach, He Tian’s hands in his hair, and he felt a knife-sharp twist in him as he let his lips part for He Tian’s cock and held the warmth of it against his tongue, salt and sweat and a bead of cum at the tip that he swallowed with too much saliva. His hands, useless, went to the sides of He Tian’s thighs, skin soft and scarred and muscle bunched up beneath his touch, steel coated in flesh.

He heard He Tian’s sharp intake, felt the shudder ripple through him like a tidal wave Guan Shan didn’t know how to catch in his hands.

‘You haven’t done this before,’ He Tian said, hitching on a sigh.

Guan Shan pulled away, a string of spit laced between them, the suction between his cheeks collapsing with a  _pop._

‘If you don’t fucking like it, I’ll—

‘I didn’t—say that,’ He Tian counters. His grip in Guan Shan’s hair tightens, tugging him forward. ‘You’re enthusiastic.’

Guan Shan pulled away again. ‘Is that—’

‘Fucking hell, Guan Shan. I’m not insulting you. Now are you going to suck my cock or should I—’

Impatient, Guan Shan obliged, felt a swell of pleasure as He Tian’s words broke themselves off on a guttural choke. Guan Shan’s eyes watered on the stinging pull at his scalp.

It wasn’t trust to allow Guan Shan’s teeth around his flesh, hot and heavy in his mouth, to know he wouldn’t bite, This was lust red as Guan Shan’s hair. This was a shadowed want like He Tian’s eyes, mercurial and shocking and dark enough, like starless nights and coal mines, digging for gold that rarely glinted or made itself known.  

‘Come here,’ He Tian said, when he started questing his hips into the new bruises of Guan Shan’s throat and Guan Shan’s jaw was starting to ache, nails beginning to draw blood in the flesh of He Tian’s thighs.

Guan Shan went, let He Tian lay him on his back, shivered as a ball of spit hit his skin— _‘_ _Fuck,’_ he whispered—He Tian’s thumb trailing the mess in until it glistened over bared flesh. 

He Tian pushed; Guan Shan let out a shout, held the rest of it tightly inside of him.

It wasn’t trust as he was stretched, spat on, seen—pressed into. 

It wasn’t trust as He Tian held himself up until they barely touched, until Guan Shan was scrabbling for closeness, tugging him down until his fingers dug into He Tian’s shoulders, until their chests collapsed, sweat-soaked and sheening against each other, until the pressure stole the breath from Guan Shan’s lungs as He Tian pressed in him—to the back of him—again and  _again_  until he was clutching at the broad frame of him.

Guan Shan couldn’t breathe. The room was lost around him, colour and sound faded—there was only this, the pressure behind his eyes and behind his abdomen like a mould pressing into clay and rendering the impression to stone. He Tian flipped Guan Shan onto his stomach, pushing down between his shoulder blades until his breath smothered itself in a pillow, inhaling sweat and the lingering headiness of cigarettes and He Tian’s cologne. 

His back arched up, thighs threatening to cave beneath him like an avalanche ready to spill, and Guan Shan could feel the build. He reached back, neck twisted until his mouth met He Tian’s; he could taste himself, could taste gin and whisky, and spit stringed between them and broke when He Tian had him on his back again. His hips hoisted up beneath He Tian’s hands, He Tian pushed his way back inside relentlessly, made easy by spit and pre-cum and loose muscles—and Guan Shan’s vision shattered.

‘No more,’ he pleaded. ‘God,  _fuck_ , no fucking more.’

And it wasn’t trust as He Tian obliged, sucked at the sweat pooling Guan Shan’s collar bones with his tongue, painted Guan Shan’s stomach white as he pulled out, lay at his side and stroked him with strong, ruthless insistence, held Guan Shan’s cock against his stomach until they matched, a watercolour of each other’s sticky, drying pleasure.

It wasn’t trust as He Tian lit up a cigarette in the aftermath, passed Guan Shan a glass of cognac like it was water, retreated to the bathroom and emerged with a wet cloth he pressed to the back of Guan Shan’s neck like this wasn’t business. 

‘Are you good?’ He Tian asked, while Guan Shan swallowed the booze with a shaking hand, and He Tian wiped the cum from both of their stomachs with a slow drag of cloth and heaviness around his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ said Guan Shan, shifting over to the edge of the bed so He Tian could lie next to him. His thighs twinged, stomach hollowed—he felt empty. ‘This doesn’t change anything.’

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ He Tian said—blankly. He said, ‘This is part of the city. It’s not a debt.’

 _Why does it feel like one?_ Guan Shan thought.

‘Should I have signed something before… that?’ he asked.

He Tian huffed a laugh, took a curling drag from his cigarette, breathed out smoke. ‘Not for that,’ he said. ‘No strings attached. No loopholes. I just wanted to fuck you.’ He glanced over at Guan Shan, who hadn’t moved his gaze from the high ceiling. ‘I think you wanted it, too.’

Guan Shan swallowed. ‘You think everyone wants you,’ he said gruffly. 

‘No,’ He Tian corrected steadily. ‘I think everyone thinks about fucking me. They don’t want to spend much more time around me than that.’

‘Are you waiting for me to leave?’

He Tian tapped ash into the bedside tray. ‘In the beginning—’

_There was a word._

‘—I thought you’d be out as soon as I lit a fucking cigarette.’ Another drag, and he stubbed it out. ‘And now I’m not sure. I’m not sure about most things with you.’

_And the word was…_

For some reason, Guan Shan lifted his hand, pressed his mouth into the flat ridge of his knuckles, ignored the sting in the base of his throat that crackled and spat like fire on wet wood. 

‘How d’you feel about that?’ Guan Shan asked eventually. 

His mind kept tugging back onto the permanent realisation that he was lying in He Tian’s bed, with him, that he could feel the heat of the man’s body, feel the weight of his gaze. The smell of sex lingered between them, and the sheets were damp with Guan Shan’s sweat, collecting in the crater between his shoulder blades while He Tian pressed him into the mattress, spilled cum they hadn’t caught, and the leak of beading water from the cloth, abandoned as it smacked wetly onto the hardwood floor.

He Tian asked, ‘Would you believe me if I said I didn’t have an answer for you?’ His hand reached under the sheet until his nails grazed the warm skin of Guan Shan’s thighs, the touch lazy and indulgent and striking a lightning bolt through the placid haze Guan Shan had been soaking in moments before.

Guan Shan breathed out slowly. ‘I’d believe you,’ he said, with an effort. ‘For once.’ 

He Tian’s laugh was a murmur that shifted the sheets, made them brush against Guan Shan’s navel like hot breath. 

‘You’re a thorn in my side,’ He Tian said. ‘Keep cutting me and drawing blood. But damn if you aren’t pretty to look at.’

‘Is that my—my  _redemption_?’ Guan Shan asked wryly, almost with resentment. ‘A pretty face?’

‘If you think that’s all I can measure in a person, then you know me far less than I thought.’

Guan Shan rolled his eyes. On impulse, he jabbed He Tian in his chest, swallowing sharply when He Tian hissed, winced.

Guan Shan jerked up. He’d almost overlooked the bandage. ‘Shit, your shoulder—’

Waved off: ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine—’

‘Fuck, I didn’t—’

‘ _Guan Shan_ ,’ He Tian said, voice resolute and uncompromising. He stared up at Guan Shan through the darkness, and a smile had curved its way around his mouth like a crescent moon. His fingers wound around Guan Shan’s bicep, the grip warm and iron-strong. If he’d wanted, if Guan Shan had fought him, He Tian might never have let him go.

‘I’m fine,’ He Tian said. ‘It’s fine. Now sleep. It’s been a long day.’

‘You’re gonna let me sleep in your bed?’

He Tian matched Guan Shan’s wary look with an arched brow. ‘Haven’t you already?’

‘That was different,’ Guan Shan muttered. 

He Tian smirked. ‘I wouldn’t have fucked you in my bed if I didn’t want you in it after.’

‘What a damn fuckin’ comfort.’

He Tian tugged him back down, not gently, until their skin met, and Guan Shan, wary of the wound still knitting itself together on He Tian’s shoulder, let himself lay against him—on him—coveting warmth and veiled muscle and hearing a heart that, beneath everything, was still only human.  


* * *

Guan Shan woke to the peal of a telephone, the angry shifting of bedsheets and warm skin leaving his, the heavy smack of footsteps across floorboards. 

He Tian’s voice was muffled outside the bedroom as he answered, blunt syllables and harsh consonants, and Guan Shan was filled with the feeling singular to hearing a phone call being taken and knowing he wouldn’t like to hear what was being said. 

Dread.

He heard the receiver smacked down onto its stand,He Tian’s returning footsteps, and he was barely sitting up before He Tian had tugged on a pair of trousers. 

‘Get up,’ he told Guan Shan, pulling on a white vest and dragging a shirt off its hanger in his closet.

‘Is it my father?’

He Tian paused, then shook his head. ‘She Li’s at Jian Yi’s house.’

Guan Shan stiffened. ‘What does he want?’

‘Jian Yi said he has information I might be interested in.’ 

He Tian’s movements were methodical: the loop and pull of a red silk tie the colour of blood, the buttoning of a dark grey waistcoat, the careful shouldering of his holstered pistol. ‘I knew the snake would show up eventually. He doesn’t rear his head unless he’s after something.’

‘D’you know what he wants?’

‘I can guess,’ He Tian replied grimly. He reached down, plucked Guan Shan’s shirt from the floor, and threw straight at his face. ‘Get up, and we’ll find out.’

Something must have leaked itself into Guan Shan’s expression, enough for He Tian to stride boldly across the room to his side, slide his fingers along the edge of Guan Shan’s jaw until his breath quivered on an intake. His lips met Guan Shan’s mouth, indulged them for a few seconds, a swipe of tongue, a graze of teeth, and then their eyes were locked. 

‘Get up, lover,’ He Tian murmured. 

Guan Shan, for once, didn’t argue.

 

* * *

 

Jian Yi greeted them at the house with nervous laughter and barely hidden anger and something that flickered between fear and an emotion that reminded Guan Shan sharply of He Tian, a rust-red residue left on him like he’d brushed passed his employer only slightly too closely. 

‘He’s in the drawing room,’ Jian Yi told them, coloured with distaste, opening the door wide while the awning protected them from a humid downpour.

He Tian nodded, shaking off the rain from his umbrella, and propping it in the holder beside the door. With a swipe of his shoes on the mat, he went inside.

Jian Yi didn’t follow, and as seconds passed, He Tian’s back disappearing into one of the rooms off the hallway, neither did Guan Shan. 

Guan Shan knew what Jian Yi was seeing: he’d been wearing the same clothes he left in last night, wrinkled and stained with the night’s early gestures and touches—hadn’t showered since then either. He smelled of sex, and He Tian’s cigarettes, and The Phoenix’s deep liquor stores, and he looked like it too. 

‘You don’t need to say a damn thing,’ Guan Shan muttered eventually, breaking the silence with a quiet warning. 

‘I thought you were knew what you were doing,’ Jian Yi whispered back. With a glance behind him, he tugged Guan Shan inside and clicked the door shut.

Guan Shan didn’t step back; they sheltered their voices between them like fugitives hidden on a freight train. ‘Like you know what you’re doing with Zhengxi?’

Jian Yi chuckled awkwardly. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he dismissed, folding his arms across his chest. ‘There’s nothing between us.’

 _Bullshit._ Guan Shan felt his jaw shift. Jian Yi was struggling to meet his eyes. ‘Do both of you know that?’

Jian Yi glanced at him, and after a moment, said, ‘We’re not in the business of falling in love, Guan Shan.’

Something punched Guan Shan low and heavy, a slow-moving fist cutting through the air that he should have moved from— _could_ have moved from. The opportunity for self-preservation had been there, and he hadn’t taken it. Why hadn’t he taken it?

‘Guess I’m saved from that,’ he heard himself say. He made himself think of last night, about He Tian’s touches that teased at gentleness and said,  _It_ _could be possible, but I won’t make it so._ He thought about He Tian and love in the same vicinity. 

Impossible.

‘Don’t be too sure,’ Jian Yi said quietly, and then the brevity passed, a cloud parting. Jian Yi laughed to himself, tapped Guan Shan on the arm with the back of his hand. In a sing-song voice: ‘It’ll have a gun to your head when you least expect it.’

Guan Shan swallowed the humourless joke. He thought that He Tian would sooner put a bullet through the grey tissue of Guan Shan’s cerebellum than indulge in something like  _love._ If there was someone  _not in the business_ of that kind of emotion—it was He Tian.

Guan Shan swore inwardly at himself. Was he so desert-dry from having someone to fuck and get their hand around his dick and make him come that he was starting to throw himself down this craggy hill of thought? Moments of whimsy that looked like artsy sunlit apartments made of red brick in Greenwich Village and morning strolls through Central Park? Nights curled against each other’s friction-hot skin and moments that smelled like sex and liquor and sounded like laughter, rarely harvested, and the frequently familiar taste of each other’s cum.

Guan Shan shook his head. ‘We should go in before there’s a fuckin’ bloodbath.’

 

* * *

‘I don’t do deals with the devil.’

‘You know, there are people in this city who’d say you are it.’

He Tian shrugged. He was standing at the unlit fireplace, made up with newspaper and dry logs, and a Dutch still-life hung above the mantle. He Tian’s tie matched the painted hibiscus. Guan Shan thought about how his eyes might have looked while a fire crackled below him. 

In one of the armchairs, dressed in white and a pair of beige brogues like he was drinking lemonade on Coney Island, sat She Li. He would have appreciated a lit fire: his hair was sodden, his clothing soaked, a victim of autumn showers seeping into the upholstery. 

The attention of the two men fell on Jian Yi and Guan Shan as they entered, Jian Yi situating himself before the door, Guan Shan at the corner where a tall window overlooked the street, streaked with sullen raindrops. 

The conversation only paused for a few seconds.

‘I’m not here to preach my case,’ He Tian said flatly. He lit a cigarette between his lips. ‘I don’t have time for that.’

‘And yet you want to work with them,’ She Li pointed out. ‘The chips aren’t going to fall by themselves, darling.’

He Tian rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s make this easy for us both. Tell me about Sauer. Tell me why I lost a warehouse of workers. I’ll give you what you want.’

She Li looked at his nails. ‘You couldn’t afford me.’

He Tian laughed out the side of his mouth. Like the pull of a magnet, his eyes met Guan Shan’s. They softened.

Guan Shan’s stomach turned. 

He Tian looked back to She Li. ‘Are you sure about that,  _darling_?’ 

She Li ignored the open mockery while his attention fell onto Guan Shan. His foot bounced where it was balanced across his knee. ‘You again,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know anyone could catch his eye so quickly.’

‘You’re in my house, She Li,’ Jian Yi warned, propped against the doorframe. ‘As a guest. Act like it.’

She Li ran his tongue over his lips, craned his head backward and around the edge of his chair. ‘Or what, Jian Yi? Will you spank me?’

Jian Yi’s face screwed up. ‘I’ll stick one of your knives in you. Is that enough pain for you?’

‘Hmm. What’s the line between a pervert and a masochist?’

‘Are you both done?’ He Tian interrupted. ‘Were you here for business or to threaten and impose on my staff?’

She Li’s expression went neutral. ‘You use the word threaten strongly.’

‘I use the word business stronger.’

She Li laughed. He reached for a pitcher of iced tea on the table, stewing with mint leaves and juniper, poured himself a glass. Before drinking, he raised it in He Tian’s direction. ‘You’re going to need to look out for yourself before your business soon, He Tian.’

With ease, He Tian stubbed out his cigarette on the granite mantle and threw the remains into the fireplace. He clasped his hands together, an elbow on the mantle. ‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked.

‘I’m placing my bets,’ She Li said. ‘Your business is about to go down and I’m choosing a side.’

He Tian’s expression didn’t change. ‘Choosing a side? What happened to making the most of a power vacuum? If I’m down, you’ve got a lot for the taking. We both know you want to be sheriff.’

‘If you go down, there won’t be room for me. Not against that kind of enemy.’

‘And what enemy would that be?’

She Li smiled. His glass dangled in his hand like he was getting ready to drop it just so someone else would have to clear it up. ‘You don’t do deals with the devil, darling. Let’s call this a fort-sixty partnership, and we’ll be savvy.’

He Tian scoffed, stared at the ceiling before sliding his eyes across to She Li. ‘You’d never stoop for anything but fifty-fifty.’

She Li’s jaw twitched. ‘I know when not to beg.’

‘You’re a snake, She Li. You’ve been crawling through shit your whole life.’             

‘Instead of standing up like you and getting a bullet in the shoulder?’ She Li sneered. ‘I’ll take shit any day.’                                                                                                                                                                                             

He Tian’s voice went flat. ‘And yet you’re here. Offering  _me_ something. That seems like begging to me.’

‘I thought I’d save you the dishonour when you watch everything you’ve built and cared for burn.’

He Tian looked at Guan Shan. Helplessly, Guan Shan looked back. 

_If you burn me, I will pour gasoline over you and gladly watch you burn._

Guan Shan wanted to tell him it wasn’t him. He’d done his quiet simmering. He’d caught flame and been put out already. He’d been wetted and sweetened, and He Tian didn’t have much to doubt in him any longer. 

But He Tian only looked back at She Li. ‘What makes you so sure I’ll be the one to lose?’ he asked, passive.

‘Because you don’t even know what you’re up against.’

‘I can handle a surprise.’

‘Not this time,’ She Li said. ‘You wouldn’t have come to New York if you could.’ He looked at Guan Shan, shook his head. ‘Too much heart. That’s your downfall.’ 

Guan Shan swallowed this in the same way He Tian did: silently, and with chaotic understanding. Jian Yi knew the truth of what She Li was saying well enough. He’d seen the risks in a way that Guan Shan and He Tian were blindly hurtling past. They weren’t in the business of falling in love.

 _Fucking ridiculous,_ Guan Shan made himself think. Their cum on each other’s skin didn’t promise anything that involved the heart. This was cordite and bleeding gums and bullet wounds. Glass shards at the throat from a broken bottle and blood winding its way down the wrist like ribbon.

This wasn’t  _love_ —it wasn’t going to  _be_  love. It was going to be desperation and adrenaline clawing its way out of violence with broken fingernails.

‘Get out,’ said He Tian.

She Li raised an eyebrow that said,  _Really?_

And He Tian gave him a look that said,  _Now._

She Li sighed emphatically, swinging his leg from across his knee and letting his heels thump into the floor. He slid like mercury from the chair and to his feet.

‘I’ll show myself out, then?’ he asked, making the statement a question as he paused in front of Jian Yi. He was only slightly too close, enough for Jian Yi’s spine to curve backwards as he looked back at the man with distaste. 

‘It’s not like I  _wanted_  you here,’ Jian Yi replied nastily, angling his body sideways. 

She Li shrugged. ‘One day, darling,’ he said, with a wink, and raised his hand as he walked out to the hall. ‘A pleasure, gentlemen,’ he called back. ‘Keep your eyes wide open!’

As one, they all listened for the sound of his retreating footsteps, the shutting of the door. Through the parting of thick curtains, Guan Shan watched his silvery head duck beneath Jian Yi’s awning and onto Mott Street, lost in the humid haze of stormy rain and hefted umbrellas.

Jian Yi shuddered like She Li had left a residue coated on his body, and flopped down into the vacated armchair. ‘He makes my skin crawl.’

Guan Shan waited for He Tian to respond, but he was already moving his way to where Guan Shan stood. His body overlapped the gap between the curtains, face split between shadow and muted, grey-sky daylight as he looked down. His eyes shifted, tracking movement carefully. 

‘He got caught in the rain,’ he murmured. The passivity—the quiet thoughtfulness—made Guan Shan chill. She Li hadn’t taken a cab; he hadn’t thought to grab for an umbrella. He had run. In his white suit, threatening the flick of filthy rainwater from the streets and damp clothes and ruined hair—he’d run. ‘Whatever is coming for us, it’s coming fast.’

Jian Yi leaned forward in the armchair. ‘What do we do?’

He Tian shook his head. ‘She Li was right. I can’t handle a surprise. There’s nothing I can do.’ He ran a hand along his jawline, his rings catching on overnight stubble with a rasp. ‘I need you to make calls for me, Jian Yi. Tell the workers to close up and keep their guns by their beds. I can handle lost profit—I can’t lose more people I trust. I’m not burying another kid.’

Jian Yi nodded. Guan Shan scratched at the unseeable wounds on his skin that came from seeing a boy dying in a hospital bed. 

He Tian turned from the window, leaned himself against the frame. His knuckles curled around the wood, and Guan Shan thought about putting his hand on He Tian’s thigh, or on his shoulder, or blocking off his vision into the room by planting himself between his knees and cupping He Tian’s face in his hands and—

‘Tell Zhengxi to keep The Phoenix closed for tonight. Get Mei Fen to contact the guests. A bottle of champagne should do it.’ He paused, cleared his throat. ‘And contact the associations, and every laundry in the city. Ask if they know of a Mr Mo who arrived in New York around thirteen years ago. If I’m still alive by the morning, I expect to hear some good news.’

Jian Yi raised his eyebrows. He looked between Guan Shan and He Tian. ‘A Mr Mo as in…?’

At the mutual silence, Jian Yi nodded quickly, rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘Right. Sure. Not paid to ask questions.’

He Tian paused and said, ‘Thank you.’

Jian Yi went still. ‘Aw, come on…’ he started cautiously, but the words broke off. He moved his mouth awkwardly like he was tempted to make a joke, but the air wasn’t made for it. Instead, he said, ‘I followed you across the country for a reason. You don’t need to thank me.’

He Tian said, ‘If She Li’s right, maybe I do. Might be the last chance I get.’ 

 

* * *

 

They fucked.

It wasn’t like last night, a methodical taking, a natural progression of what they both knew was to come. 

The curtains had been drawn now, the dust sheets ripped from the furniture, the mirror wiped until their reflections stared openly back at them both in a way that said:  _I know your body, and you know mine, and we don’t have time for_ _pretence_ _anymore._

He Tian swallowed Guan Shan down like he was the Last Supper, and Guan Shan wasn’t nervous to scratch up He Tian’s back this time—the second time—and get flesh and blood under his nails. He was coming to learn the way He Tian stiffened before he came, how He Tian liked to clean them both after sex, how he hissed and shook in their shared shower while the water ran red and the gouges in his back cleared themselves of crusting blood. 

Familiarity was shaping its way around their making for two, their indulgent little deaths, their building pleasure that peaked with blessings of sharp pain. 

Closure. That’s what it was, while Guan Shan tightened around He Tian’s cock and He Tian pushed him lower over the back of the chaise lounge. A ringing finality while He Tian pulled quiet, choked breaths from Guan Shan’s throat, strangled and catching through his teeth, a string tied around the center of him, drawn up up up. 

Closure, and heady acknowledgment that this might be the last time. 

 _What a fucking shame,_ Guan Shan thought in the bedroom, after, towelling himself down from the shower and watching He Tian dress, lat muscles bunching as he pulled on a new shirt.  _You’ve wasted what might be your last damned moments with me. In me._

He didn’t say that, but he didn’t need to. They both  _knew_  it.

After, they drove to Xui Ying’s for a drink—or three—while light was fading. He Tian chased his gin down with lime-sweet tonic, followed it with a swig of brandy that made his face tighten into a wince, and Guan Shan nursed a cup of  _samshu._  

‘All okay, boss?’ Xui Ying had asked as they occupied a booth. The bar was noticeably empty; Xui Ying had just had the call from Jian Yi.  

‘I’ll lock up,’ He Tian, a wad of cash in his hand. ‘You should go home.’

Xui Ying pocketed the bills, and took his leave. The bar—more importantly, its liquor store—was theirs for as long as they wanted, which He Tian had promised wouldn’t be long.  _Just something to take the edge of,_ he’d said in his apartment.  _I hate drinking in my own home. You shouldn’t eat where you shit._  

‘Guess I don’t need to say this is a bad fucking idea?’ Guan Shan asked, tearing a sodden cardboard coaster to shreds. ‘You tell everyone else to lay low and you’re getting pissed?’

He Tian said, ‘I’ll die with a bottle in my hand before I die in my bed.’

‘And a lit cigarette in your mouth?’ Guan Shan grumbled.

He Tian winked. ‘I’m a simple man.’

 _Fucking liar,_ Guan Shan thought.  _Simple_ belonged to the kind of people who lived in Guan Shan’s village. Who lived lives that let them live—survive—and do little else, running on rice and wheat and pale tea. Where ambition was a risk and the failure famine. He Tian didn’t need to try and survive in New York’s twisted climate; he could have gutted his bank account and fled somewhere exotic and never looked back. Lived long and happy on cocktails and his fingers wrapped around the thickness of a cigar.   

Whatever his logic, or his drive—it was really fucking far from simple.

He Tian sombred at Guan Shan’s expression. ‘Nothing’s gonna hurt you,’ he said. ‘Not while you’re with me.’

_Nothing except for you, and everything around you—and aren’t they the fucking same?_

‘Doesn’t sound like a promise you’re qualified to keep,’ Guan Shan told him.

‘I’ll do my best. I owe you my life.’ 

Guan Shan thought about the bridge, about He Tian tugging him away from a car.

‘What about all the other men who’ve killed for you?’ Guan Shan asked. ‘Who’ve died for you? Don’t you owe  _them_  somethin’?’

He Tian swirled a mouthful of gin around his tongue, and swallowed. ‘They were paid for their loyalty.’

‘So am I.’

He Tian shook his head. ‘You think I signed your father’s death sentence. And you  _still_  did it.’

Guan Shan looked away. He didn’t want this conversation again where he didn’t have viable answers. He Tian had the upper hand often enough that it was uncomfortable.

‘Let’s go,’ said He Tian, grabbing his cane and getting to his feet.

‘We just got here,’ said Guan Shan, confused.

‘And now we’re leaving. Come on.’

 

* * *

 

The Phoenix was closed, as He Tian had requested. Cool night air had swept away the day’s humidity, and the city had shrouded itself in a starless darkness only broken by street lamps and car headlights, and the occasional glimmer of light peering through the gaps between curtains. It was a Friday night: the streets were speckled with strangers begging for change and men and women dressed for hotel ballrooms and underground nightclubs, looking for the driest martinis and the dirtiest sex and a pill that would help them forget it all the next morning.

Zhengxi was nowhere to be seen, the empty stage and empty tables like quiet ghosts, and He Tian poured them both drinks at the bar.

‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ Guan Shan asked, accepting a mix of cognac, triple sec and lime juice. He winced on the first sip; He Tian had a heavy hand. ‘What was wrong with Xui Ying’s place?’

‘Nothing,’ He Tian said, lifting the needle of the gramophone behind the bar and letting the tinny sound of jazz warble out. ‘Do you have a problem with The Phoenix?’

‘I never said that.’

‘Then drink up.’

Guan Shan took another sip, felt the burn of brandy in his belly, and settled the drink on the bar counter. He Tian sat himself down next to him, twisted in his seat so his knees pressed against the side of Guan Shan’s thigh, and he had a full view of the bar.

The movement made sense to Guan Shan: He Tian was waiting for someone to come through the door. He’d been waiting for someone in the apartment, patience running out and sending him to Xui Ying’s bar, and he’d been waiting for someone there before resorting to the Phoenix. He wanted to see whoever might come through the doors and think about shooting him in the back. 

‘You don’t want it easy for you to be tracked,’ Guan Shan guessed.

He Tian snorted. ‘If anyone’s tracking me, they know exactly where I spend my nights. Don’t you think I’m being a little obvious?’

‘Then why the hell are you playing cat and mouse?’

He Tian shrugged. ‘I’m not a sitting duck.’

_Except you are. You knew it the moment She Li showed up like a fucking vulture waiting for the scraps._

He didn’t say it, and He Tian glanced at the sour twist to his expression and sighed. He propped his cheek on his fist, let his eyes travel the planes and sharp edges of Guan Shan’s face. Took a sip of his own drink, and seemed to like what he found.

His voice was soft. ‘You must have really fucking hated me,’ he said. ‘That’s the fire I’d seen. Hate for me.’ He Tian shook his head, and his tone turned wry, and oddly self-deprecating. ‘I should have recognised it. It was going to get me killed.’

‘Still could.’

‘No,’ He Tian said. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do it.’

Guan Shan straightened in his seat, body going tense. ‘Are you calling me a coward?’ he asked, teeth gritted.

‘ _No_ , I’m saying you know what’s right and wrong. You shot Sauer, didn’t you? And I’m betting it wasn’t for my sake. Would you have done it if you didn’t know about the girls he ruined? How he snorted a line and hooked himself up to a pipe every night?

‘He was an addict,’ Guan Shan muttered. ‘That didn’t make him wrong.’

‘He was a rapist.’ He Tian pointed a newly lit cigarette at him. ‘That did.’

‘You sell the girls. You think that makes you  _right_?’

‘I pay for their medical bills and give them protection and a way to make money when they haven’t got another choice. And it  _is_ a choice. I’m not a good man, Guan Shan. But I’m fucking better than he was.’

Guan Shan’s thoughts were clouded. Clarity was tapping at him like something trapped on the underside of a frozen lake, a dull thudding, ice too thick to break through. He watched them drown.

‘Do you think you’ll find him?’ he asked quietly.

‘Your father?’ He Tian let out of a breath of smoke. ‘I don’t know. Everyone knows more than they should in this city. It’s the ones who don’t ask questions that Jian Yi will be wary of. The rest will be nosy enough to ask for information. Your father’s name will get around quickly enough out of sheer insidious gossip.’

‘Will you bribe them? The ones who know somethin’?’

‘Everyone wants something,’ He Tian told him knowingly. ‘Most people are easy to persuade.’

Guan Shan paused. ‘Sure about that? Sauer wouldn’t take your money or drugs.’

He Tian’s eyes fell onto the empty stage. His brows furrowed. ‘It couldn’t have been loyalty. He’s as fickle as She Li. He was just getting everything he needed— _wanted_ —from his employer.

‘She Li said he knew something about my father.’

He Tian was shaking his head before Guan Shan had even finished. ‘I won’t get anything from that fucker. He wants a partnership. I can’t give him that for a single piece of information. I can’t give him that for anything.’

Guan Shan ground his teeth. He scratched his nail into the patterned texture of his tumbler. ‘I thought the life debt would have been worth that.’ 

He Tian clamped a hand around Guan Shan’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Whatever,’ said Guan Shan. He ran his tongue across his gums and muttered, ‘You’re doing more than I could alone.’

‘And my body and liquor is yours in the meantime,’ He Tian said, smirking.

Guan Shan rolled his eyes. ‘Is that supposed to be compensation?’

He Tian’s look darkened comically. His hand dropped. ‘Now you’re just being ungrateful.’

The corners of Guan Shan’s mouth turned up, and the motion made his throat close up. He thought about them keeping this up: this easiness, the veiny humour, a fragmented thing like water held in cupped hands, slowly seeping through the gaps between their fingers, damp residue left behind.  

They soaked themselves in it, let the record play itself out. Eventually, He Tian reached over the bar and swiped the bottle of cognac, taking a swig straight from its neck. Eventually, Guan Shan took the bottle from He Tian’s grip and did the same.  

‘Cheers,’ He Tian said. 

Guan Shan’s gums burned. ‘To what?’ he asked, wiping brandy from his mouth with the back of his hand. He would taste it there later, maybe.

He Tian shrugged. ‘To us. To this. To nothing.’

 _Us._ Guan Shan swallowed down the word, premature and thrilling. He oscillated between loathing and fear and a spark of hope drifting like a will-o’-the-wisp.

‘You’re an optimist,’ Guan Shan said. 

He Tian smiled, inclined his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I can hear footsteps coming from upstairs.’ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider leaving kudos, commenting, and/or [see ways of supporting me as a writer via my Tumblr!](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)


	7. truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has given kudos or commented on this fic. It's been a pleasure to write, and I'm so thankful for Tracey for putting in this request. Enjoy!

He left when Guan Shan was seven: a pat on the shoulder, a crouched murmur in his ear, and a briefcase slipping past a closing door. Guan Shan remembered the echo of footsteps for days, grew sick with the hitched, wet gasp of his mother’s words than went on for weeks, her quickly desperate escapes from a crowded room. She’d been stronger before, but perhaps that had been hindsight—a puncture wound of Guan Shan’s own skewed memory.

And then it turned into the waiting—the pretence that Guan Shan’s father was a man gone to war, allowed R&R upon receipt of victory, the false claim for patriotic pride—and a patience that dissolved with the sound of an open door. A hope that flared with footsteps approaching his home. An unfamiliar man roaming the village.

It gutted him, now, that the footsteps he and He Tian could hear coming from above them would not be his father’s, and thirteen years later, a hand reached out from the cracking space between his ribs and hoped that it would be.

_Click, click, click._

Guan Shan’s heartbeat reverberated through his chest; he could feel it shaking like an ache in his molars while shoes tapped against the floorboards above them.

‘We need to—’

'Get down,’ He Tian muttered. He swept their glasses from the surface of the bar, snatched his cane from a nearby stool, and strode around to the back of it, his footsteps almost silent, more predator than prey. Guan Shan followed almost immediately, slipping from his seat and hurrying through the bolted gate to the bar. He crouched down behind the glossed wood. Held his breath. Listened.

 _Click, click_.

Realisation struck him—the odd pattern of movement, the changes in sound. He shuffled closer, words light. 'They’re not alone.’

'Good thing there are two of us, hm?’ He Tian replied quietly. He was down on one knee at Guan Shan’s side, his pistol released from its holster. It looked small in his grip.

Guan Shan understood the order. His own pistol was warm in his palm from resting against his chest. He examined the notches in it, the faint scratches in the metal from minimal second-hand use. He hadn’t fired a gun since the German, Sauer. Hadn’t felt his ears ring and hand go numb from its fire, lungs filled with lead and barium residue. He felt no yearning thrill to feel it again, and knew he would. Soon.

The space behind the bar was an expanse of sticky wood and patches of dust that coated the kneecaps of Guan Shan’s trousers. He rested his ear against the latched door, found the small slit between the door and its frame where light leaked through, and his eye peered out.

'Anything?’ He Tian murmured, breath fanning hotly across Guan Shan’s face.

Guan Shan swallowed. 'Not yet,’ he murmured back. The bar was as empty as it had been seconds before. The record had stopped spinning, a sound of scratchy silence echoing around the dimly lit brick walls of the Phoenix. Flames flickered from the oil lamps beside the curtained entrance Guan Shan had crept through weeks before—and the fabric shifted.

They crouched, frozen, as a set of shoulders pushed its way through to the bar, followed by a second, a third, all Chinese, tattoos painting the visible skin of their knuckles. One was dark and unassuming, the second wore white hair cropped close to his skull. The third made Guan Shan’s blood chill.

At He Tian’s persistent tapping on his shoulder, Guan Shan held up three fingers. Silently, carefully, He Tian leaned over, shoulder nudging Guan Shan’s away and thieving the look-out, his folded body flush against Guan Shan’s. This kind of closeness wasn’t about sex, and while Guan Shan could appreciate absently the way He Tian’s skin smelled coated in cognac and cigarettes like an obscene kind of perfume, toxicity bottled up, the triggered pistols between them made it something finite and distinguishably ugly.

Guan Shan watched He Tian register the scene, the men, the un-empty bar. Did he see what Guan Shan had? The resemblance, the aged sculpture of his own self? Did he, perhaps— _surely, he had to_ —already know?

Guan Shan watched him, and his stomach flipped like a car crash.

He Tian leaned back on his haunches, and the strings that held his head aloft were snapped; his head drooped between his hitched shoulders, a penitent sinner begging for redemption—and he looked at Guan Shan. Grimness hung from the corners of his mouth; tiredness gleamed the whisky tinge of his dark eyes.

He knew.

Guan Shan hated that He Tian knew.

It was going to hurt him.

There was no time to ask. Their silence was vital while the three men tracked their careful way through the bar, shoe heels clicking quietly against the floorboards, inspecting silverware on the set tables, rubbing cloth between their fingers, sniffing the air like bloodhounds. Sweat was soaking Guan Shan’s shirt, and he wondered if they would smell it. His lungs were a torrent of fire while he listened for their movements, and he let go of a built-up exhale. His pulse was everywhere.

He Tian tapped him on the shoulder. When Guan Shan looked over at him, he made a series of gestures with his hands, pistol held fire-ready in his grip.

_You take the first, I’ll take the second._

Guan Shan frowned.  _The third?_ he mouthed.

He Tian smiled, and stood.

The first shot rang out before Guan Shan’s knees had unbent. The ringing in his ears burned and left him shaken.

_Focus, aim, fire._

He shouldn’t have taken the moment, but he had to: Sauer was buried in autumn-wet New York earth because He Tian would have otherwise been dead in his place—unmourned, unburied. Graveless. These men had no guns out, no weapons on show, liable to kill Guan Shan or He Tian in a blink. The moment was a lesson in justification.

They had no weapons out, but probably, Guan Shan told himself, they would use them with none of the hesitation Guan Shan was having to throw out if it came to it.

And it did come to it.

The white-haired man was staring at him, dead-eyed and exact as a newly dawning sun on the horizon. Guan Shan had been looking for the impression of a pistol beneath a suit jacket. He hadn’t seen the strap over his shoulder, or the flash of metal. He hadn’t seen the shape of a submachine gun slung into his grip and aimed right at Guan Shan.

Smoke burst around him in a bright flash of white. His fingers numbed. Sound dribbled away in the echo of gunshot and his breath was knocked out of him like a thunderclap around his lungs.

He Tian’s hand on the scruff of his shirt was tugging him down, and the force brought him back onto the floor behind the bar while sound and smoke and bullet shrapnel settled on the dust-laden floor, brass fragments under Guan Shan’s feet.

 _'Fuck—Qui—’_  Guan Shan heard, a clattering of weapons hitting the ground, of bodies slumping to the floor. A gurgle of bloody breath.

There were indents on the underside of the bar from bullets that hadn’t penetrated the wood, metal bent inwards like fingerprints in soft dough. There was a reason He Tian had brought them here; the bar was He Tian’s own trench.  

'Did you get him?’ He Tian was whispering harshly in his ear, hands patting Guan Shan for bullet wounds. 'The white-haired guy, did you get him?’

'I think—I think so.’ Guan Shan pressed his ear against the wooden gate, his body trembling. 'What about the third one?’

'Still out.’

The words were confirmed by a shuffling, the ruffle of cloth, a dust-agitated cough. Guan Shan imagined the man swiping blood from his cheekbone with the swipe of a thumb.

'Hiding, He Tian?’ they said, voice rough and low. They were no closer than they had been before He Tian and Guan Shan shot down his comrades. 'You weren’t raised to be a coward.’

He Tian’s head knocked against a bottle of kiersch. His hand rested on a bent knee, and his pistol shook. 'We can talk about cowardice when you start talking about my warehouse. About Sauer. About the fingers you had stuck into Tammany Hall’s pies.’

'Did you think I wouldn’t? That I’d let you run off to the Big Apple with no consequences?’

He Tian pressed a fist to his forehead. 'You couldn’t wait for me to leave San Francisco.’

'Because you were fucking up. You’re fucking up, and I’m fixing it.’

He Tian spat the words: 'You’re a fucking gangster who doesn’t like someone else having shinier  _toys_ , He Cheng.’

Bottles exploded into shards; wood and metal were pummelled by bullet fire. Guan Shan sat frozen as He Cheng emptied his gun into the bar, trigger pulled with brutal unrelenting succession, his skin lightly ribboned with glass cuts. His mind was wrapped around He Cheng; his hand around He Tian’s free wrist. He could feel He Tian’s pulse, unnervingly steady, as his mind worked through the debris of the last few minutes.

Another death to add to his rosta.

Another He wormed into his life and making a shipwreck of it.

It made sense; a patchwork of crumbs kneaded into something hot and fully fleshed. How Jian Yi and Zhengxi had followed He Tian to New York like refugees fleeing a war.

 _He runs the West,_ He Tian had said. What would a man do like that when someone was beginning to conquer the East? Power spreading like a disease through the mass of America, Chicago a halfway house of organised crime, a no-man’s land for the He brothers. An older, more experienced man choking off his brother’s resources like a hand around his throat, planting moles in the political machine of New York City that burrowed their way through He Tian’s success.

Sauer hadn’t given in because he didn’t want anything; he was unusable because He Cheng had already given him everything. He Cheng knew Sauer’s supplier in Chicago because he  _was_ the supplier. How hilarious Sauer must have found it—how fucking  _precious_ he must have seen himself, both brothers trying to get their hands in his pockets and promising him the moon. He Tian was never going to win while his brother chased him across America and gunned for his failure.

 _Genesis_  was a showcase for Cain and Abel’s violence, and He Cheng had the bloodied rock in his hand.

'He has a second gun,’ Guan Shan told He Tian, catching a glimpse of metal tugged beneath He Cheng’s jacket through the door hinge.

Resignation poured through He Tian’s voice: 'Of course he fucking does.’ He worked his jaw, raised his voice. 'You couldn’t just pick up the fucking phone, could you, He Cheng? Had to fuck up everything I’d built too.’

He Cheng’s voice rang through the bar: 'Everything you've  _built_ is a stain on our family.’ He stayed where he was; any closer and He Tian would prop the muzzle of his gun on the bar and fire.

He Tian’s pulse was spiking under Guan Shan’s touch. 'Your work is more ethical than mine, is it? All the blood you’ve spilled in San Francisco is  _just,_ is it?’

'I don’t flaunt it, He Tian. I’m not hosting dinner parties every night and giving everyone in the city dirt on my business to bring me down. You’ve done this to yourself. Be grateful it’s me.’

'Be grateful it’s you,’ He Tian muttered quietly. He shook his head. His pistol was tapping unnervingly against his knee, an itch to pull the trigger going unscratched. Guan Shan watched as he reached into the lining of his jacket, tugged out one of his Turkish cigarettes, and struck a match on the rough underside of the bar. Smoke marked his spot like the mushroom cloud of a bomb. 'Couldn’t get She Li, though, could you? Or the Jian’s. I bet you  _hated_ that.’

'Oh, I had more than enough, He Tian,’ He Cheng said dangerously. 'I don’t need someone I can’t trust at my back. You should’ve learnt that. And you don’t know what I’ve done for the Jian’s. You never did.’

He TIan’s face screwed up. 'You fucking bastard. You backstabbing bastard.’

He Cheng took a step, glass crunching under his foot. 'You knew—’

'That father would send you to be his fucking errand boy? Sure, maybe I knew. I didn’t think you’d fucking  _go through with it_.’

'Father didn’t send me, He Tian. I sent me.’

Guan Shan didn’t know what was held in those words that made He Tian move, but it was like pulling a trigger. Releasing the latch on a trap door into a pit of vipers, into which He Tian fell hard, skin punctured with venom, body infused with a kind of spite and vengeful loathing. With a kind of disgruntled resolve, it made him prop his cigarette between his lips, and stand.

Guan Shan didn’t know who fired the first shot, but he felt the colour red.  

His knees popped as he shot up, and his second bullet struck the submachine He Cheng had retrieved from the floor, throwing it out of He Cheng’s loose grip and sending it skittering across the floor. Guan Shan made seven strides closer; it earned him He Cheng’s attention.

Guan Shan saw it from outside of himself: He Cheng’s pistol swinging towards him like the boom of a ship, Guan Shan’s own firearm lifting in answer, and then a jerk like a ragdoll. White, searing pain brought Guan Shan back to himself. A burn of bullet casing stripping layers of flesh at his temple. Salty tears flooded his vision, and blood gushed down the side of his face.

He heard He Tian shouting his name like an echo as he gripped his head, saw He Cheng’s gun latched onto his brother like a magnet catching iron fillings. This wasn’t a fist-fight with a bullish politician. This was death with the squeeze of an index finger.

He Tian wasn’t watching his brother’s gun: he was watching Guan Shan. His attention—his lack of it—was going to get him killed.

Guan Shan lurched.

* * *

For once, he accepted the offer of a cigarette.

'You killed my brother.’

'He had it comin’,’ Guan Shan muttered, spine pressed to the wet brick of the Phoenix’s alleyway walls. 'And no, I fuckin’ didn’t. I got him the leg and knocked him out with the butt of my gun. He’ll wake up with a hell of a headache.'  _Like skull shards in his brain_ , Guan Shan thought.

He Tian sniffed. 'You should’ve killed him.’

Guan Shan glanced at him, flicking ash onto the wet ground. The strain tugged at ripped skin; cool night air grazed the wound on his head like a straight razor. It was superficial. Cleaning, stitching. A bottle of Xui Ying’s Russian moonshine. Guan Shan kept looking at him, because He Tian was fucking sublime, most beautiful at his most dangerous.

Too  _composed_ for a man whose brother just tried to murder him. Too put-to-fucking-gether.

'Did you know? That it was him?’

He Tian looked at the wall ahead of them, and took a long drug. The alley was dark, rain-damp, and wedged between the Phoenix and its neighbouring drug store. Here, the autumn coldness was only just shy of successful at killing the stench of rotting food and piss. The stinging pain at Guan Shan’s temple was doing a good job at blurring most of his senses to stop him from noticing.

'I didn’t know,’ He Tian said, breathing cigarette smoke to the ground. 'Maybe—maybe I thought it, I don’t fucking know. But I didn’t want it to be.’

Guan Shan’s mouth tugged sideways. 'He was the reason you left the West Coast…’

'Doesn’t mean I didn’t want my brother to be the one trying to kill me.’ He Tian swiped a hand across his face. Water was dripping from the drain pipes above them, landing in fat globules on the top of their heads; He Tian was oblivious to the onslaught. 'We’re a fucked up sort.’

_That’s where we’re different. They’re nothing to me._

'Sharing a name doesn’t make you family,’ Guan Shan said, squinting. 'Isn’t that what a Tong’s all about?’

'The Tongs,’ He Tian huffed dryly. He tugged a ringed hand through his hair, stared at the moisture on his knuckles with bland curiosity. Whatever lay heavy in his thoughts went unspoken. 'We should move. He’ll already have eyes on me and men rushing the place any second now.’

Guan Shan nodded, thought of the sprawling mess of the city, the bloodied matting of his hair. The injury that would infect if he didn’t get a bottle of ethanol and some stitches at it soon. They had to get out of the city. Anywhere in New York’s boundaries would be a dead zone.

Guan Shan ground his cigarette beneath his shoe. 'Where are we going?’

He barely had the question out when a voice boomed out towards them: 'Are you two getting in or do I have to  _drag_  you!’

He Tian squinted into the darkness at the end of the alley, and they both saw it at the same time: a Nash Coupé, engine hovering on the sidewalk, the grey paint black in the darkness, and a blond head peeking out the driver’s window.

Jian Yi.

He Tian’s lips parted. His breath fogged. 'Son of a…’

Together, He Tian and Guan Shan skipped over the cobbles of the alleyway, cautious glances thrown with an adrenaline-fuelled carelessness as they crossed the empty street, and crammed themselves into the back seats of the car. Zhengxi pulled off the handbrake immediately, passing bars and market stalls and gloaming florist kiosks, and the Phoenix grew small in the rearview mirror. Police lights had started to swell in the street like fireflies, their wailing a quiet dirge. Staring resolutely through the windscreen, Zhengxi popped open the glove compartment, extracted a small beige box of unopened Camels, and passed it over his shoulder to He Tian.

He Tian blew his first inhale back out over Jian Yi’s eager face, his torso twisted in the front seat to look back. 'I thought I told you to stay at home,’ He Tian growled, tapping ash out the window while Guan Shan shivered against the leather.

'We did,’ Jian Yi answered. His gaze slid to Guan Shan. 'But I got a tip-off about an hour ago, and—we’ve found your father.’

Guan Shan felt his stomach push up towards his mouth.

'Where is he?’ He Tian demanded, while Guan Shan asked faintly: 'Alive?’

'Just about,’ Jian Yi grimaced. 'He got bought over by the Port Authority for the interstate crossings. He’s been working on the George Washington Bridge the past year. He’s sick.’

'Is that better than dead?’ He Tian remarked gloomily. 'They work men to the death on those damned crossings. Fuck knows how he’s lasted thirteen years at it.’

'He had a work permit,’ Jian Yi said. 'Got signed off with a bunch of other guys from China. Guess whose name they’ve got on the dotted line.’

He Tian tossed his cigarette out the window like a dart, smothered somewhere on a wet road beneath punishing, heavy tyres. Smoke remnants curled from his nose, his mouth.

He said, 'Sounds like  _He_ , but doesn’t end in  _Cheng_?’

Jian Yi’s mouth sloped at the corners. 'We saw him go in. Didn’t think I could hate him more, honestly. You’ve said it to me before. Cheap labour supplied by our own people. If they’re not legal, you won’t even have to pay 'em…’

'Your brother sold my father to the highest bidder. He was never gonna get back home.’

'Welcome to America,’ Guan Shan heard Zhengxi mutter.

Guan Shan said, 'So your brother sold my father to the highest bidder. Brought him here on some false dream and just fucked him over. Treated him like a slave.’ Anger bit through him like a virus. 'He was never gonna get back home.’

'Welcome to America,’ Zhengxi muttered solemnly.

Silence enveloped the car. Guan Shan was grateful that he was sitting; his body didn’t feel like it could hold him up. He felt the leather stitching at his back, the hum of the engine grinding through the metal body, felt every dip and crevice in the surface of the roads, wheels juddering and jolting him to-and-fro. Everything was magnified. Everything placed him here, now, in this moment, a thirteen-year conclusion that rose up before him like a storm wave, collapsed over him with salt water ripping down his throat and up his nose, and made him sick to his fucking stomach. His mind was refusing the reality of it.  _Take it back_ , it said, returning it in bloody shrapnel.  _I don’t want it._

He swallowed, hard. 'Where is he now?’

'The docks,’ Jian Yi said. 'The ship leaves in an hour for London. Get him fixed up in England for as long as it takes, and then you’ll take the open connection trip back to Canton.’ He paused, deliberation flashing. 'If that’s what you want.’

Guan Shan looked at He Tian, but his question was for Jian Yi. 'How did you find him?’

He Tian’s eyes went to Jian Yi’s, and silent, indecipherable communication passed between them, fast enough that Guan Shan’s breath hitched. He jabbed his thumbnail into the soft flesh of his left hand, caressed the scarring cigarette burn, a dirty memento from another time, another place, a different pulsing of his heart.

'We’re here,’ said Zhengxi, rolling the car to a slow stop, killing the engine. He was the first to get out, Jian Yi clambering swiftly in his wake, gravel crunching beneath their feet as they moved away and coated the inside of the car in silence.

Guan Shan’s hand shot out as He Tian reached for the car door.

'What did you do?’ Guan Shan asked lowly, releasing He Tian’s wrist. 'What’ve you done for me?’

He Tian craned his neck, throat bared, and smiled. 'What I owed you.’

Guan Shan’s eyes darted across He Tian’s face, his dark features, the shadows under his eyes that gave way to everything the evening had seen. A betrayal that ached like sugar rotting away his molars, saccharine sweetness turned bitter as bleach. A knife between the shoulder blades that wasn’t planted by Sauer, or some unnamed Italian mobster. He Tian had been spinning wildly, blindfolded, and forgot to look to the ones closest, his brother a Brutus that had sent a warning before the stabbing.

He Tian got out of the car.

Outside, it was drizzling lightly, a faint mist lingering in the air, rising off the water like wandering spirits, the atmosphere charged with a heavier rain. Ship hulls were lit up in the orange glow of lamps, hunched workers roaming mildewed jetties, hands callused and rope-burnt. The stench of fish and salt was a constant, thick layer, washing over them on a light breeze, and the docks were a different beast at night, quiet and slow, compelled into a hush singular to predawn darkness.

Guan Shan headed over to where the three men were standing. 'You said he was on one of the ships.’

'Pier thirteen,’ said Jian Yi, pointing.

Guan Shan squinted into the darkness.

A small steam merchant ship, unremarkable compared to the rest of them, sitting on the rippling surface of the water. Steam drifted lazily through its tall tunnels, and Guan Shan could make out the stacks of cargo crates tied onto the decking. Guan Shan remembered the dark, cramped underbelly of ships like those, machinery wedged up against cargo holds, filthy body pressed against filthy body.

'Don’t worry, he has a cabin,’ said Jian Yi. 'The ship’s doctor has already seen to him.’

Guan Shan was only half-listening. There was a man standing on the pier, slight and suited. Orange light glinted off the silvery head of hair.

'She Li found him,’ Guan Shan realised, staring at the man in the distance. 'He arranged for this.’

When he turned, Jian Yi and Zhengxi had retreated back to the car, slouched against the metal. He Tian was the only one left, a hand in his pocket, the other grinding the base of his cane into the ground. He was looking at the ship, unfazed when Guan Shan grabbed his suit by the sleeve.

'What the fuck did you  _do_?’ Guan Shan demanded, shoving his face close.

He Tian sighed. His bland smile was wry, and dismal. 'What the hell do you  _think_ , Guan Shan?’

'You told me you wouldn’t.’

'Well, I suppose I lied,’ He Tian said, shoving him back slightly, not enough for him to stumble. 'Or maybe the circumstances changed. It’s not like I have much use for the business anymore. My brother’s… efficient. And She Li’s a disloyal shark who’d sell his own soul if he could make a profit on it. He’ll do well with it. And now our debt’s clear.’

Guan Shan’s hand dropped from the fabric of He Tian’s suit, but he didn’t step away. His face felt hot. He Tian said it easily, like the sacrifice was a simple one. He’d banished the thought of giving She Li anything hours before, and now he spoke like he’d sell a constellation for a strong cigarette and a stronger orgasm.

The veiled sky meant that the stars were invisible, brightness untouchable, the moon a hazy glow. In five days, Guan Shan would be looking at a different sky. Fifteen more, give or take, and he’d know them well.

Home, his father—it was all in easy reach. Why did it feel like he had to choose it?

'What are you gonna do now?’ he asked tiredly. Helplessness, unwarranted and bewildering, threaded around him like walking into a spider’s web.

He Tian shrugged. 'Go north. I have contacts in Boston. Risk the South, perhaps. Get a ferry somewhere—Vancouver—I don’t know.’ He spread his arms like the wings of a bird, cane resting against his hip bone. 'The world’s my oyster.’

'Then why’d you sound sad?’

He Tian’s brow furrowed, a few faint lines stitched into his forehead, but he said nothing else.

_Come with me._

The impulse was foreign, and sudden. Guan Shan felt it like swallowing water too quickly, tears springing at the corners of his mouth, a sudden ache in his throat like a muscle stretched too quickly. Somewhere, the universe was collapsing and expanding around the possibility that he’d ask. Somewhere, around the possibility that he wouldn’t. But the guillotine was coming down, the blade that severed the line between them, placed them back in their own worlds, where they both rightfully belonged. Guan Shan didn’t want to get cut. His father was on that ship.

'I’m sorry for all the shit I put you through,’ Guan Shan said. 'You’ve lost everythin’.'  _I’ve made you lose everything._

He Tian rolled his eyes and scoffed in a way that told him to him to fuck off—that assured Guan Shan he wasn’t that significant. He wasn’t that much of a ruinous presence on the black expanse of his life, a tear in the fabric of his future, his past. Probably, he wasn’t much of anything. An inconvenience and someone who warmed his bed sheets for a few nights.

'Not everything,’ said He Tian. 'I’ve had precautions in place for a while now, most of my assets moved to Lombard Street. I’ll be fine.’ His gaze flickered over to the pier. 'Be safe, Mo Guan Shan. I’m glad one of us has done well out of all this, at least.’

'Yeah,’ said Guan Shan. He thought about kissing him, thought about patting him on the arm. But any touch would seem too clinical, too  _efficient_  of a goodbye. 'Watch your back, He Tian. You don’t seem to be any good at that.’

He Tian swung his cane lightly into Guan Shan’s shin, a tap that barely hurt. 'I’ll be fine,’ he said, and jerked his chin towards pier thirteen. 'Now fuck off.’

Guan Shan flipped him his middle finger. The walk to the pier was like walking through quicksand.

He nodded at She Li, who was standing silently at the walkway to the ship, and realising there was nothing to say to him, Guan Shan stepped onto the shuddering walkway. The rope railing was damp under his palms, the wooden planks slippery with mildew. The ship creaked and groaned on the water, metal pulleys clacking together, tarpaulin sheets rustling in the breeze. Guan Shan tugged open the nearest door when he was on deck, and ducked through to the ship’s innards.

It was dimly lit, engines and pumps rumbling beneath Guan Shan’s feet, and he followed the signs on the walls to the guest cabins, grateful his father wouldn’t have to rub shoulders with the crew.

At the end of the ship, most of the rooms were empty, one or two commissioned by merchants or wealthy New Yorkers eager to reach London as soon as possible. Guan Shan wandered through the narrow hallways in a daze.

His father’s cabin turned out to be larger than the captain’s.

Through the parting of thick curtains, Guan Shan could make out He Tian still on the docks, Jian Yi gesturing wildly to him about something in the drizzle-turned-rain. Dim lamplight made out the varnished desk in the corner of the room, the door to a small private bathroom, and a table opposite the bed made up with fresh fruit, polished china, and a covered loaf of bread already broken into.

The bed drowned Guan Shan’s father, whose head was shaved and littered with cuts and sores, the wounds glistening with a salve, his dark skin sallow and grey. If he hadn’t seen the freckles on his hands, knuckles grazed and bruised, or the inherited auburn lashes, Guan Shan would have thought he’d walked into the room of a stranger.

The doctor was nowhere to be seen, but Guan Shan could smell the beeswax,  _huang bai_ , and ginseng from the salve. A pang of homesickness fell him through the core. His mother kept a jar of it at home.

There was a stool beside the bed, the cushion still warm from the ship doctor’s attendance. When the wood groaned beneath Guan Shan’s weight, his father’s eyes opened.

It would have been poetic for sunlight to push through the window, for something universally momentus that marked the reunion. But there was nothing. Just the creaking of the ship and caw of gulls roaming the water’s edge for scraps of food.

They stared at each other. The clock on the desk made its presence known with each  _tick, tick, tick._ Four o'clock struck. The last time Guan Shan slept he’d been in He Tian’s bed.

Guan Shan swallowed. 'Pa,’ he said. His throat was as dry as a desert, the words scraping themselves out like gravel. 'I'm—it’s me. Mo Guan Shan.’

His father blinked, focused his gaze. Seconds passed in silence. Guan Shan watched the slow track of a tear wind down the side of his father’s nose, slope over his sunken cheeks, and dip into the corner of his mouth, his lips cracked and dry. He was shaking.

'You stupid, stupid kid,’ he whispered, the words choked. His voice, weathered and worn and raw, was achingly familiar. 'The hell are you doin’ here, leavin’ your poor ma behind?’

Guan Shan’s spine bowed, voice cracked. 'Looking for you, old man.’

His father turned his face away, pressed his cheek into the pillow, let it grow transparent with tears.

His crying was silent, the sobs swallowed messily, eyes and mouth screwed up with sorrow—with relief. When Guan Shan’s fingers curled around his father’s, the bones sharp and skin thinner than it should have been, his grip was still as strong as iron. 

* * *

He let his father sleep, their reunion paused when the doctor came to administer another dose of morphine. Guan Shan thought about how He Tian had pushed the drug away, but enough time spent staring at his father’s haggard face discouraged any protest he’d thought of making. He’d refused it himself while the doctor stitched up the flesh wound on the side of his head, washing off the blood with a bottle of peroxide and casting a knowing look at Guan Shan’s collar that said he wasn’t going to get the blood out of his shirt too.

For twenty minutes, Guan Shan dozed in the adjoining cabin room, identical to his father’s, and dreamt of stars. He woke to boots stamping along the hallways, the top decks, through the engine rooms and cargo holds below deck. The crew was readying to hoist the anchor.

Guan Shan looked around his father’s room. Nothing was different; nothing had changed. His father’s breathing was low and steady while he slept, sated and rested, no more toil. No bridge left to build. The water would take him home. Would take  _them_ home. The both of them. Just the two of them.

Guan Shan propped himself against the cabin window, and his fingers hovered on the curtain, the fabric rich and thick between his fingertips. Rain pounded on the pane, falling heavy. Guan Shan closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose—

—and yanked the curtain open.

A horn blared through the ship. The hairs on Guan Shan’s arms stood on end.

They were disembarking, leaving New York.

And He Tian was gone.

Guan Shan drew the curtains closed again, slower this time, ignoring the way his hands shook.

 _You stupid fuck,_ he berated himself.  _He wasn’t gonna fucking wave you off._ He snarled at his own presumptuousness, kicked the toe of his shoe into the floor in lieu of putting a fist through the wall. And the shoes weren’t really  _his_ , were they? The shirt on his back, the dirty gun against his chest—that was all He Tian’s. He’d given him everything; he’d given him his father.

And now he was gone.

Guan Shan ran a hand through his hair, swift and brutal as drawing a straight razor over a throat, and slumped back onto the bedside stool.

A knock sounded on the door.

Guan Shan sighed. One of the crew, to give him the safety briefing. Maybe the doctor again. He pushed himself from his seat, and his body reminded him of its aching; he’d killed a man today, and his muscles weren’t forgiving him for it. Having his father at his side wasn’t forgiveness. Maybe there wasn’t any.

He opened the door.

'Oh,  _finally_.’ Breathless laughter, a hand on the door frame, white-knuckled. 'Do you know how many rooms there are on this fucking ship?’

Guan Shan stared at him. His mind was scrabbling to understand reality. 'What the fuck are you doing here? How’re you—’ He looked around frantically. 'We've  _set sail,_ He Tian.’

'I know.’ Rain was running in rivulets down He Tian’s face, and he was favouring his right side. He looked delirious. 'You had your head stitched up, then?’

Guan Shan gaped, heart pounding. 'Did you fuckin'  _jump_ onto this ship?’

He Tian ignored the question. 'I’ll show you around London when we get there. You’ll like it. Maybe.’

And all Guan Shan could think to say was: ‘You’ll fucking hate Canton.’ Over a barrage of  _he came back he came back,_ he imagined leading He Tian through his small, rural Chinese village where diamonds meant nothing and men smoked pipes instead of cigarettes, and his blood ran warm. Showing He Tian his home _._ Soaked to the bone, and wildly dishevelled, He Tian might almost belong there.

He Tian paused and said, 'Probably,’ but there was a glimmer in his eye, a discerning expression that made Guan Shan’s stomach swoop and his pulse race. He kept a hold of the door frame, but sloped his body forwards, close enough for his breath to warm Guan Shan’s face, for Guan Shan to see the devilish, conspiratorial gleam in his dark eyes.

'How would you feel,’ He Tian began, 'about Shanghai?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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